The IPP offers financial and non-financial incentives to all participants: the students, the faculty members, the industry partner, and the profession at large.
The students’ receive salary from their internship employer (the IP) and the IPP provides supplemental salary; thus, the IPP is the premium internship opportunity for students. This allows us to select the strongest students to participate. In addition, the students benefit from a unique “capstone” type of internship experience in which they work on a hand-selected, substantive and challenging project, with a unique emphasis on teamwork and an interdisciplinary approach.
The participating faculty members receive a stipend under the IPP. In addition, the faculty members’ scholarship benefits from exposure to the nature of the “real world” problems that practicing actuaries work on, and from interdisciplinary collaboration on these problems.
Since the faculty members’ participation is paid for by the IPP, the IP receives the faculty members’ services for free; this is the financial incentive for the IP. Moreover, the industry partner benefits from collaboration with the faculty, as they bring leading edge knowledge of the field, extensive command of the literature, academic rigor, and an interdisciplinary approach to a larger scale project than is typically possible in a standard internship program.
Finally, the actuarial profession benefits from the tangible end results of the IPP projects, the increased collaboration between the academic and practitioner communities, and a concrete model of successful, replicable partnerships between industry and academe.
