Math alum Chris Bitz finds his fit in actuarial science

July 14, 2025

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater alum Chris Bitz has always enjoyed numbers, whether it was calculating them in a classroom, punching them into an Excel spreadsheet, or seeing them displayed after his latest pole vault attempt.

Bitz, who earned a B.S. in mathematics in 2023, was a four-year member of the Warhawk men’s track and field team. Now he is thriving as an actuarial analyst for Nationwide in downtown Milwaukee.

He’s been with the company since starting there as an intern in November of 2021, just under halfway through his junior year. He remained an intern through his senior year, focusing on manual group processes, before earning an offer to stay on full time.

“The internship helped with using Excel on a day-to-day basis,” Bitz said. “Once I got further into the internship, then it was about how I can make the right decisions based on the data, which is something UW-Whitewater helps to get at through a couple classes.”

The experience has come full circle for Bitz, who has been managing one intern for each of the last two years. (Nationwide currently employs an intern from UW-Whitewater who doesn’t report to Bitz.) Day to day, he is concentrated strategically on where the best areas of business exist and what areas the company should be targeting.

The textbook definition of what an actuary does is assess financial risk for businesses, including insurance companies, but Bitz believes it’s much more than that.

“I think there are a lot of areas within actuarial science,” he said. “For example, I work on our first-year pricing team, so groups coming to us for the first time looking for health insurance, we’ll price them as a group to see where they should be at. There’s a bunch of different fields within actuarial sciences.”

 

A fulfilling Warhawk experience

Bitz took an accounting course as a freshman at Brookfield East High School and said he didn’t love it. His mother, Maria, who attended UW-Whitewater, asked him if he had heard of actuarial math and science and suggested that as a career path.

By his junior year of high school, he knew he wanted to become an actuary.

“I knew very early on that math was my thing,” Bitz said. “From a young age, I was always very good at math — I like the numbers part of it.”

Bitz’s desire to continue his athletic career as a pole vaulter in track and field — along with the university’s reputation for the actuarial science emphasis — led him to UW-Whitewater. He connected to pole vault coach Nathan Wells and head track and field coach Mike Johnson before making his decision to join the Warhawk family.

After a period of adjustment and learning, UW-Whitewater felt like home to Bitz.

“It takes a lot of time to settle in — being on your own for the first time, living in a dorm, having a roommate, all those kinds of things,” he said. “I think I finally got to a point where I was comfortable, and the campus felt like where I should be, and the team felt like family.”

Bitz found a high level of comfort — and success — as a student-athlete. He placed among the top seven in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference four times, including a sixth-place finish at the 2022 outdoor conference championship meet, and recorded his personal best mark at his second-to-last collegiate competition.

 

 

He served as a captain during his senior year in 2023 and was honored numerous times for academics and sportsmanship during his career. He was also recognized as a UW-Whitewater Chancellor’s Scholar-Athlete and earned his third straight All-Academic award from the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association as a senior.

“(NCAA) Division III was a perfect mix for me,” Bitz said. “I love my sport and wanted to put a lot of time into it, and I had the ability to do that while also focusing on academics.

“UW-Whitewater did a good job of balancing the two and making it clear, saying ‘yes, you are an athlete for this track team, but you’re also a student, and that matters more.’”

Bitz said many of his current best friends — including his roommate, CJ Pfeil — were part of the track and field program. He regularly attends the program’s Alumni Meet and currently coaches track and field at Brookfield East High School, his alma mater.

While on campus, Bitz was also part of the university’s Actuarial Club, which helps future actuaries learn, network, and develop skills necessary in the profession. As part of the group, he virtually attended the Wisconsin Actuarial Collegiate Conference, where he landed his internship that led to his full-time job with Nationwide.

“It made it very easy to learn a lot more about the career and connect with people who know more,” he said. “By the time I got to my junior and senior years, I felt much more prepared having been in that club.”

 

 

Bitz, who was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Scholarship, also shouted out mathematics faculty members Geethamali Samaranayake and Wesley Hough for positively influencing his time at the university. He served as a supplemental instructor for one of Hough’s classes and was a math tutor in Campus Tutorial Services.

 

A promising path to career success

Bitz hopes to secure his certification from the Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) and continue building his career at Nationwide to a managerial level.

He continues to put what he learned at UW-Whitewater into practice. He cited his preparation for exams — a critical part of an actuary’s career — as something the university helped him with.

There are 10 exams to pass to become fully certified as an actuary — Bitz has passed four and is waiting on results from a fifth.

“UW-Whitewater offers a couple classes that get you in the door for those exams and teach you the basics for the first two,” he said. “It gives you a grounding of where to start, and you can build on that for the next eight exams — or however many you decide to do.”