Jinnan Tang
Employer and area of work
Insight Risk Consulting, general insurance.
How would your best friend describe you?
Easy-going, fun and understanding.
What motivates you?
Challenges.
What would be your personal motto?
Work hard. Play hard. Sleep long.
Name five dream companions to be stuck on a desert island with?
Bear Grylls the hunter, Jamie Oliver the cook, Pipi my dog, the cute one that barks, David Attenborough the educator, and the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader - there goes my Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
What's your most 'actuarial' habit?
Mentally assigning probabilities to events occurring, paying attention to patterns, constantly optimising my model against new observations from Mother Nature - in short: reason from experience.
Favourite Excel function?
The magical INDIRECT at the moment.
How do you relax away from the office?
Play throw-and-fetch with my dog, which involves me throwing a frisbee and me fetching that frisbee
good fun!
What is the funniest thing that has happened to you recently?
While playing in a student actuary's five-a-side league, I managed to score an incredible goal. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong goal.
Alternative career choice?
Better make 'choice' plural here
a zoologist, I've always been fascinated by animals; an astronomer, looking for extraterrestrial lives; a vegetarian martial artist who lives in a temple on a remote mountain in China.
What song best describes your work ethic?
Eight Days a Week by the Beatles.
Greatest risk you have ever taken?
Climbing a TV tower that looked like a mini Eiffel Tower at about age 10 and interfering with the TV signal for the whole residential block.
If you could go back in history, who would you like to meet?
I'd like to meet the person who built the time machine, before it was built, and show the film Project Almanac.
If there was a movie produced about your life, who would play you, and why?
I'd be interested to see my wife playing my character to find out how she would portray me and her thoughts on being me. We might just discover new sides of each other we wouldn't otherwise know!
If you could be anyone else, who would it be?
Business magnate and engineer Elon Musk.
