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Not an actuary but a friend from college is and my dad observed/worked with actuaries in the pharma industry. This is my personal opinion, if you like math it's a good way to make money doing math so you don't have to be a professional academic or a barista. Starting salary around $80k and companies have to pay you more when you complete your exams. It's a lot of fucking math. Lots of prob stat. You're calculating insurance premiums based on your models.
My dad thinks the entire profession shouldn't exist and that it's a lot of BS but he was working with people that started with desired outcomes and pulled data out of their ass to match the outcome. He didn't think any of them were useful to the company, much less competent at what they do.
I have no idea what a career path looks like for an actuary other than these anecdotes, so you could talk to some people to find out.
