Ben Scarsella's
Superpowers, Ranked

Ben's core superpower. Over a decade of experience calculating contribution rates, projecting fund solvency, and making sure retirees actually get their money. Every retiree who receives a pension check has an actuary like Ben to thank. Without this superpower, the entire retirement system collapses. You cannot overstate the importance of someone who does this well.

Most people have no concept of probability. They think a 30% chance means 'it probably won't happen' and a 70% chance means 'it definitely will.' Ben passed the SOA Probability Exam — he actually understands conditional probability, moment generating functions, and distribution theory. At a poker table, he's calculating pot odds in real-time. In a thunderstorm, he's estimating the actual probability of a lightning strike. He can't turn it off.

With 4 LinkedIn endorsements for Microsoft Excel (which is 4 more than most people have for anything), Ben's Excel skills are certified by his peers. VLOOKUP? Child's play. INDEX MATCH? Routine. Pivot tables? Before breakfast. Circular reference errors? He can smell them. Named ranges, conditional formatting, array formulas, VBA macros — Ben has achieved Excel mastery that most people don't even know exists.

This is the superpower that freaks people out at parties. Ben can look at demographic data and tell you the probability of a 65-year-old male surviving to 85. He knows the difference between period life tables and cohort life tables. He understands mortality improvement factors. Most humans avoid thinking about death; Ben has turned it into a professional skill. It's like having X-ray vision, but for human lifespan statistics.

SOA Exam FM/2 covers interest theory, annuities-certain, amortization, bonds, and financial derivatives. Ben passed it while still at Purdue. He can calculate the present value of a 30-year annuity-due in his head faster than most people can find the calculator app on their phone. When someone says 'I'll pay you back later,' Ben's brain automatically discounts the promise to present value.

Not every actuary volunteers with Best Buddies and works as an in-home care specialist for individuals with special needs. Ben did both. This superpower is the rarest combination: high-level mathematical ability paired with genuine human empathy. The actuarial world is full of people who are good with numbers. Ben is good with numbers AND good with people. That's a superpower most actuaries would trade their HP-12C for.

West Lafayette, Indiana in January is approximately negative infinity degrees. Ben survived five years of this while simultaneously studying actuarial science — a major that combines the difficulty of a math degree with the soul-crushing exam schedule of a pre-med student. He was also in the Paint Crew, which means he voluntarily painted himself gold and stood shirtless in a freezing gymnasium while screaming at basketball opponents. This is a man whose grit cannot be questioned.

Ben was doing remote work before the pandemic made it mainstream. Benefits Link (2019-2020) and Associated Pension Consultants (2021-present) were both remote positions. While the rest of the world was struggling with Zoom fatigue and discovering that working in pajamas isn't as fun as it sounds, Ben was already optimized. Home office setup dialed in. Work-life boundaries established. Productivity maintained. He was doing remote actuarial work when most people still thought 'WFH' meant 'We're Faking Holidays.'

Two LinkedIn endorsements for PowerPoint. This is the actuarial equivalent of a chef's kiss. Most actuaries create presentations that look like a mortality table threw up on a slide deck. Ben's PowerPoint skills mean he can take concepts like 'stochastic modeling of pension fund solvency under adverse mortality improvement assumptions' and turn them into something a human being can understand. Translating math into English is its own superpower.

In the age of 500+ LinkedIn connections and 3,000 Facebook friends, Ben has 71 LinkedIn connections. That's not a weakness — that's a feature. Every one of those 71 connections is someone Ben actually knows. He's not collecting people; he's maintaining real relationships. And the fact that Cody Springman considers him his best friend tells you everything. Cody has options. Cody chose Ben. That's the highest endorsement available.