Actuary

Year 1–2: Actuarial Analyst

You're an entry-level analyst making around $70-80K, doing the unglamorous data work — pulling numbers from databases, cleaning spreadsheets, and running models someone else built. Most of your real energy goes to exams: you've passed one or two before getting hired, and your company gives you paid study hours, but you'll still spend most weeknights and weekends grinding through probability and financial math problems. Failing an exam is normal and demoralizing — pass rates hover around 40-50%.

Year 3–4: Mid-Level Analyst, Halfway Through Exams

You've passed 3-5 exams and your salary has climbed to roughly $90-110K with each pass triggering a raise. The work gets more interesting — you're building models instead of just running them, and underwriters or managers actually ask for your opinion. But you're also burned out: you've been studying nights and weekends for years, and the remaining exams get harder, not easier. Some of your cohort quits actuarial work entirely around now.

Year 5: Choosing a Track

You're close to finishing your Associateship (ASA) and have to pick a specialty — life insurance, health, property & casualty, or pensions. Each path has different exams, different employers, and very different day-to-day work: P&C is more modeling and catastrophe risk, health is more regulatory and policy-driven, pensions is slower and more consulting-flavored. The choice locks in your career direction for at least the next decade because switching tracks means redoing exams.

Year 6–7: Associate Actuary

You've got your ASA credential and you're earning $120-140K. You own pieces of pricing or reserving work, present findings to non-actuaries who don't always understand them, and start mentoring the new analysts who are where you were five years ago. If you chose to keep going for Fellowship, the exams continue and so do the late nights; if you stopped at ASA, you've reclaimed your evenings but capped your earning potential around $150-180K instead of $250K+.