How relevant would this undergraduate research be?

I'm grading probability and statistics homework for a professor whose research interests are "Time series with applications to finance and climatology, Randomized response models, Extreme value modeling". I told him about my programming experience and asked him if he could use an undergraduate programmer, and that I did not want to get too deep into theory or analytic solutions but rather work on my programming skills. He seemed delighted and said he does have some projects for me. He uses the R programming language, which he says is similar to C. I asked him if he has any data sets with less than 1,000,000 entries, and if it would be OK for me to use VBA. He said I could use VBA, but I would have more work programming, since R is much more efficient for this application.



How applicable does this sound to actuarial work?

How relevant would this undergraduate research be?