<p>I'm a senior in high school. I'm a smart kid, (35 ACT, 5 on BC calc and Stats, taking calc 3 with university of Illinois) but I am FAR from a genious. I struggle with some concepts in my calc 3 class and I'm not one of those people who have things just click for them. I'm going to wind up going to Wisconsin, Illinois Urbana Champaign, or Michigan for college, I don't especially want to go to an ivy nor am i especially confident I'd be accepted. I can't decide if I want to double major in Econ/Math or enroll in one of the great Actuarial Science undergrad programs at these schools. </p>
<p>From what I understand, being an actuary is a secure and stable, yet boring job. I'm the type of person who can live with this so long as I'm making 6 figures within a reasonable time frame. </p>
<p>A quant, on the otherhand, sounds much more intriguing to me, but from what I understand jobs are less stable, harder to find, and much more competitive. I don't want to go to grad school to get a Financial Engineering degree if it's not going to pay off (I understand wall street quants can rake in a million a year if they're good). I am hard-working and passionate about math, and I love money, but I don't want to screw myself over and be working at some dead-end programming job if I can be enjoying the benefits of security and stablility in being an actuary. </p>
<p>Basically, Modeling and Trading>boring number crunching actuarial work for me, but Job Opportunity is very important.</p>
<p>I was also wondering what exactly a trader does, would this be suiting for me?</p>
<p>Any advice would be much appreciated.</p>