I'm very excited to have finished going through my Statistical Methods course, my first study afternoon of the session is today so I'm looking forward to being able to revise instead of learning the course for the first time.

Work this week has been fairly similar to what I was working on two weeks ago. I'm still finalising the preparations for the year end work that will be starting soon, and carrying out checks for the sign off of some model changes that have been proposed. Most of these have now been signed off, with two troublesome ones left to go.

With any luck these will be all be agreed by my next blog!

Preparations continue for the year end work. I've been working on some developments which will improve our current processes. Hopefully making the processes of generating tables and retrieving results quicker with fewer margins for error.

The week has been a good one, on Thursday my team managed to avoid coming last in the Actuarial Quiz (which was a relief as the losers hold the next one). It's reassuring to know that a good knowledge of Friends, Harry Potter and Girl's Aloud has its uses for every Actuary!

The coming week should also be a good one, I'm attending a tutorial in London on Thursday which should give my study progress a huge boost, and have Friday off work to give me a long weekend in London. I can't wait!

Back to work after the Christmas holidays! I've done well in keeping my New Year’s resolution of getting into work early for two days running – it's impressive stuff! Fingers crossed I'll be good and keep it up!

We are now in year end, which is the busiest period of the year. I need some changes to be made to a model so the next week or two will be spent testing my changes to make sure that there definitely won't be any surprises when they are brought into the live model.

Once I've completed my work on this, the next big task is to calculate the ICA (The amount of money HBOS FS need to hold in order to ensure they stay solvent in a 1 in 200 year event) as at the end of 2007. I joined my current team towards the completion of the mid year ICA so this time I have a better understanding of the process and will be able to get much more involved.

The Christmas period has been typically busy with crazy amounts of work whilst preparing for year end and trying to fit in as many social events as possible.

The first set of Actuarial Students' exam results were published last week with more to come next week, there's lots of excitement, and also the feeling that excuses to postpone study have now run out. (I've got some extra exciting Christmas holiday reading material this year – Statistical Methods – can't wait!)

This morning I'm back to reading up on ICA so that I can explain it to others – a task I'm a little apprehensive about. Whilst I understand what I plan to speak about, there are 1000s of possible questions that people might ask so I'm trying to cover all areas. It's also a good excuse to familiarise myself with the FSA handbook.

Other than research, I'm also doing some work on the development of the spreadsheets that we currently use. A quick fix was carried out at mid-year, to incorporate some new businesses into our reporting structure; this involved using different spreadsheets for different business, so I'm trying to consolidate these spreadsheets.

These are of course important, but my #1 priority of the day is to head out for lunch in a few minutes and get some cakes for my team to celebrate my exam passes!

Over the last week I've been continuing my work on change documentation. The models used to generate projected figures are complex and I need to be able to justify the movements of each variable before it can be signed off. I'm looking forward to getting on with some other, much easier tasks when this is completed!

Exam results are now looming, we've just had time to almost forget them, and suddenly it's come to that scary time of year! Once that's out of the way I'll be able to decide exactly which ones I'll be sitting in April and so will have no excuses not to fully concentrate on my study again.

I've recently joined the Actuarial Social committee and had my first meeting today discussing the Actuarial Christmas awards in which we choose from the nominations to remind people of those actuaries who've contributed that something extra over the year. For example, the "Stupid Actuary Award" - I'm not sure whether it sounds like a title worth fighting for!

Now I have had time to recover from my exams, it's approaching the time that I need to do some work on my learning log. This is a fairly controversial initiative from the institute of Actuaries meaning that new students need to keep a written record of their training and development. This requires (amongst other less time consuming components) writing four written answers each year to demonstrate the acquisition of various skills during my time as a student.

Work has been busy lately; I'm trying to iron out and explain all the differences from year end to mid year in the risk work that I'm doing. Some changes were made to the actuarial models over the first half year, so I need to make sure that movements arising from model changes are recorded adequately and are not confused with movements following changes to the data.

I'm looking forward to attending a tutorial tomorrow on Statistical Methods, an exam that I'm planning on sitting in April. Usually if I go on a course it's a revision course, although this time it's a taught course. Hopefully this will make my time spent studying much more effective - I'm quite excited about seeing whether this will be the case!

This week I've been analysing risk and trying to work out the proportion of responsibility that should be assigned to each parts of the company. The company is liable to several different types of risk but currently I am focussing on operational risk. This is roughly the cost of the risks involved with the day to day running of the company. For instance, the risk of the systems going down and how much that would cost, or the risk of not being adequately staffed and hence the unexpected costs arising from contractor's fees. It's been interesting seeing how each risk is allocated (and if there is not already an existing structure, thinking about how it should be allocated).

HBOS have also been spoiling us with social events recently. Last Tuesday, we were treated to drinks and canapés whilst being shown around the new Harbourside building in Bristol that I will be moving into next week - it's highlight for me is definitely the beautiful canal side views. Although the huge open plan working areas and plush meeting rooms are an added bonus.

On Wednesday we had a trip up to the local football ground to watch Actuarial play Accounts, we put up a good fight, but after a crazy number of injuries we conceded two goals in the last 10 minutes of play. We were a little disheartened, but a free dinner afterwards helped to ease the pain. Thursday and Friday were nights of more free food and drinks, the New Starters Buffet and the end of month drinks respectively.

Hopefully this week will be a little quieter - there's a lot of work on at the moment and I don't like staying out on too many school nights!