 Hi everyone, it's MJ, the fellow actuary and in this video I want to talk about the coronavirus and the actuarial exams. I think everyone's well aware of the virus and the pandemic that we're facing and you need to be prepared for how it might impact your actuarial studies. Some of us have been getting emails from our local societies letting us know about what's happening and they are keeping us updated as the situation progresses. It's important to know that there is the international actuarial association and they kind of set the syllabus and what needs to be covered in actual exams but the local societies are the ones who run the exams, who set the exams and who mark it. So just because one society might cancel exams it doesn't mean that the rest will be cancelled. So the big big message here is to pay attention to what your local society is saying. So try and find out who's running your exam centre, get in contact with them to make sure that you know what's happening. Now let's look at some of the potential outcomes or potential courses of action that could take place. One, the exams could go ahead as planned. Remember the coronavirus is if like it's a big meeting those things are being advised to be cancelled but actuarial exams sometimes there's only 10 people in the classroom and that might not be seen as too much of a threat and so the examiners might push those exams go forward. So that might be the situation is that the exams continue. We might see that extra precautions are taken to maybe students are spread around the classrooms or bigger spaces are taken up and but this still is like the first situation where the exam goes ahead as planned. We could see postponements so you might write the exam a week or two later or in worst case scenario it might even be postponed to the next exam session which is all the way out in September. There might even be a situation where they require the exam to be written on the computer at home and this might not sound as crazy as it might seem seeing that ready parts of the exam specifically for CS2 and CM2 that's also subjects A214 and A212 parts of those exam are written at home that's the computer element whether you're doing Excel or whether you're doing R. We might see a situation where the whole exam is done like that I don't know if that's going to happen though that's maybe a bit of a drastic measure but as a student you need prepared for anything like I say it's very very important that you keep up to date with your local exam center with your local society just to see what's happening for you just because you see let's say one society cancel it doesn't necessarily mean that your society is going to cancel as well so that is the big message is to keep the communication channels open what I am doing is because I prepared a whole bunch of workshops for the subject CS2, CM2 and the enterprise risk management it's looking like those workshops are going to be cancelled especially the ones that I've been doing going to do this week they are cancelled so what I'm going to be doing is virtually delivering some of the content of those workshops and I'm going to be putting it on Udemy and I've just finished part one which is just an introduction to the actual exams and this is kind of an introduction for any of the workshops so it's very general we just look at you know what is the purpose of an actuary what are the dimensions of risk we have a big overview of the syllabus and the various subjects and then we dive into some of my crazy study techniques so this first course has been created I'm uploading it onto Udemy as we speak right now and that is going to be available I want to make it available to everyone the introduction one so there will be a link in the Udemy course below and then instead of doing like a workshop where because these workshops I mean for 8214 it's like seven hours and it's a four day workshop so there's a lot of content that I've prepared we're gonna be putting it on Udemy so there'll be a whole course on loss distributions a whole course on mark of change a whole course on stochastic processes a whole course on time series etc etc etc so I will be posting regular updates but check check on Udemy for those various courses because maybe you're struggling with a certain section and then you can come in and check some of these videos on Udemy and get a little bit of help in case the exams do go ahead so this is just a quick little update to also let you guys know about that but of course I think we're all all aware of the safety precautions washing your hands doing a little bit of social distancing and yeah I think it's it's important to although they say whenever you tell people to stay calm that's that's when they tend to panic so maybe we shouldn't shouldn't do that whole reverse psychology thing but the whole idea is stay safe stay sane and I'll keep you guys updated with everything happening on my side but until then steady hard and yeah just I guess yeah be safe cheers everyone