Shea McNaughton

About My Role

I am currently working in the health and human services, actuarial, analytics and systems design team at EY. It is a blended team with actuaries, those who work in data analytics and those from more qualitative backgrounds.

We specialize in problems in the health and human services team, meaning we mostly work with government clients. At the moment, the majority of our work is focused in the health space and makes use of various ex-medical professionals on our team. By optimizing the qualitative and quantitative skills of the team we solve the various problems that our clients have.

What do I like most about my role?

The thing I like most about my work is that it is a bit more meaningful and has an impact on different outcomes for people. For example, one of our projects is looking at the outcomes of students from different backgrounds later in life. Thus our project can be used to change the outcomes of those students. Another thing that I like about my role is that we can work on a wide variety of projects, keeping the day-to-day work interesting and different. 

I also like working with people from a large variety of backgrounds because they often have very different ideas of the same problem which can lead to more interesting and innovative outcomes. It also leads to the work being more interesting as we have all different projects going on so no two projects are exactly the same so there's a lot of diversity in the work we do. No two days are exactly the same. 

How has my experience at university applied to my role?

I honestly haven't used much of the knowledge I learnt in my degree yet. There's been a few things where it has been helpful to have a previous understanding of it, from my degree, but nothing that has been super directly used. The knowledge of a coding language and modelling principles have helped, but my team has been happy for me to learn anything I need on the job, whether that’s my own research or getting someone to explain things to me.

Recommendations I have for students interested in my role

Get in contact with the team and tell people you're interested and want to know more. I know everyone in my team is super approachable and would be more than happy to talk to students about what they do. 

Another tip, especially for those in their earlier years is to get involved in the various student programs EY has. It gives a lot of information on the recruitment process and helps you learn about the four different actuarial teams we have. They're all listed on the website and on the EY social media.