Hi! I’m an actuary (FSA). I have worked in both life insurance and consulting. Here’s my two cents:
1)Is it primarily number crunching and filling out excel charts or is there thinking, analysis, and discovery? I don’t love math as a hobby, but I’m pretty good at it. What I mostly enjoy is the thinking, problem solving, and predictions/ theory development.
It is the latter. Anyone can fill out excel charts. Actuaries are paid fairly well, and it would be a waste of money to pay them to do something that someone else could do for much cheaper.
2) Is it possible to learn full time for several years before beginning work (assuming I take a few exams and get an internship in college)?
I guess that depends what order you do it in. I learned full time for several years after high school, then started exams while I went to Touro, and got an internship during my last semester. As long as there is not a long interruption between exams and when you start work it should be ok.
3)What is studying for the exams like?
Hard. It helps if you don’t mind failing.
[You skipped question 4. You do know that counting is an essential part of math, right?]
5)What is an average day of an actuary like (both consulting and insurance)?
Insurance tends to be less interesting than consulting, since you are most likely working for a giant company and confined to a specific area of the actuarial practice. However, most companies have rotation programs for this reason, so you can be exposed to different kinds of actuarial work. The work itself varies but will in some way be related to the quantification of future uncertain cash flows. The main actuarial areas are pricing, reserving, and maybe asset-liability management.
Consulting is more fast paced, much more varied because you will be working on a variety of projects for a variety of clients, but also higher pressure and longer hours. For the first several years (at least until you get your FSA and likely for a number of years after) the pay is not much more than what you would get at a life insurance company. Beyond that point, however, the ultimate earning potential is higher for consulting than insurance.
6)Are there other professions that involve critical thinking and analyzing data and information to draw practical conclusions that pay decently and don’t make you work 60 hours a week?
Probably. You may want to look into data science, which is becoming a thing now. But I wouldn’t know too much about other professions because I’m an actuary.
60 hours is extreme, though. At my current firm (consulting), we are expected to bill roughly 40 hours per week, and during ‘busy season’, which lasts maybe 2 months, we are expected to bill 50-55. Now, billing 40 hours is not the same as working 40 hours, as you are probably doing things over the course of the day that are not billable to a particular client. But still, I would say an average consultant works 50 hours or less in an average week. Insurance companies, on the other hand, are almost always 9 to 5.