by: Brandon Chang
The Modeling the Future Challenge comes with not only mathematical insights—both within your project forecasts and in the process of brainstorming for your project—but also key lessons from working together with a team, communicating with your actuarial mentor and coach, and persevering through difficult times while perfecting your model or coming up with creative solutions to address the issues you’ve identified.
Most importantly, Modeling the Future taught me the power of youth advocacy and the responsibility that comes with the immense superpower of being able to essentially see our future.
Today, modeling is used in a variety of ways. It assists in everything from helping financial consultants predict market changes—allowing companies to position themselves for maximum profitability—to informing policymakers and providing key insights for life-saving legislation, from California to Malawi.
That said, insights into our future—whether 10 minutes or 10 years from now—can often be exclusive and, therefore, dangerous, depending on how they are used. Are they used for personal profit by hoarding exclusive financial information? Are they used to create meaningful change and spread awareness about critical issues? Or do they remain as plots on a PDF, unseen and forgotten by anyone outside your bedroom?
My finalist team’s project last year researched a little-known issue affecting youth nationwide—an issue on which practically no prior work had been done. Terrified by the results, we couldn’t stop with mere recommendations in our paper. After completing our project, we reached out to nonprofits and were contacted by several more organizations that had been seeking key insights and data on the issue but had found none due to the sheer lack of research.
Hearing the concerns of these organizations and the parents involved, we knew we had to use our forecast results to warn our community. We collaborated with statewide local governments to ensure our community had the resources and information needed to combat this crisis and prevent the loss of more innocent lives.
Community advocacy and policy action aren’t part of the MTF Challenge rubric. However, we’ve seen many finalist teams, including ours, take the initiative to bring their insights to people in positions of power—whether in city governments or federal legislation—who can turn these findings into meaningful change. Once you realize that many of the topics being addressed have never been modeled with your specific data or methodology before, the exclusivity of your work transforms into a sense of duty. This duty is not just to sit in your room, generating models on VSCode all day, but to take your research out into the world and make a real impact in your community.
At the end of the day, math modeling as a discipline often yields no noticeable impact on its own. We could create the most accurate models, but without the communication skills to convey our results and warn the public in an understandable way, none of it truly matters. We should only “Model the Future” if we are also willing to take the results of our work and “Change the Future” for the better.