Comments: Development of an early career academic supervisor in Statistics - a discussion on a guiding rubric

Abstract

This discussant paper provides commentary on the “Development of an early career academic supervisor in Statistics - A discussion on a guiding rubric”. Later in this discussant paper, we refer to the original work as the “discussion paper”. Our perspective is that of academic actuaries involved in undergraduate and postgraduate professional training programmes. We commend the authors on a well researched and carefully argued paper, and fully support the renewed attention that has been drawn to the crisis in statistics in South Africa. Actuarial and financial risk management programmes rely heavily on strong teaching capabilities in mathematical statistics. The local crisis in statistics could therefore also be regarded as a crisis for actuarial science and other professional statistics-based programmes, such as the qualifications offered by the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics (BMI) at the North-West University (NWU).