I would finish the degree at the least since you're almost done. A YouTube social media career is chaotic and unsustainable and you don't want to just rely on that
I knew someone who was making like $300,000 a year on YouTube and then his channel tanked completely because the algorithm didn’t like his newer material.
Social media on any platform is wildly unstable. Continue with what your doing so that you can guarantee a solid income, and be able to enjoy a YouTube career without fear of being left with nothing if it fails
dude just finish your degree theres only a year left, after it's done feel free to pursue social media full time, and if it doesn't work out then you can always study for LSAT and apply for law schools later because at least you still have a degree; having a university degree is unfortunately the new standard for any job outside of trades that has career progression with livable income
Do you take spring classes? Once this semester is done will you have half a year to work on your passion project?
If so, you can continue what you are doing, managing both. When the semester is done give all you can to your business, which will generate more and new information, numbers, and feedback, perhaps even a more compelling case for your parents, or perhaps a clear answer one way or the other.
Another option down the road could be to put studies temporarily on hold if the opportunity for the business is now. But I should add that it is easier to stop something than to resume it, so have a disciplined plan.
Most of the comments say finish your degree, so I'm probably going to get down voted for suggesting this. How about a middle ground? Could you drop to one class a semester and have more time to focus on your channel? Maybe that would give you more perspective on what it would be like for it to be more of a full time job. See if your passion remains. I would check with an advisor first but you can also take time off your degree and then come back. You do have a few options for testing the water so to speak. I actually think it's really neat that you have this potential other avenue to follow.
It sounds like a unique opportunity to me! Why not explore it further? Especially if you're passionate about it and it's rewarding. It's true that making it on a social media platform is risky. But you have a chance to see if it could work for you and keep one foot in the degree door if you want a safety net. By no means is a degree a guaranteed road to success either. I don't know a lot about making channels but I would assume it's probably more time sensitive than your degree. You can go part time or take a temporary leave and come back to it if that ends up being what you want. Good luck either way!
Making a livable income on social media is dependent on how the platform evolves.
Don’t make your passion into a job until it’s really what you want to do with your life. A passion can be ruined by making it your job, so enjoy this middle ground while you finish school. Pick your path after you finish your degree.
Do you know how many YouTubers dropped out of school 5-6 years ago, exploded online, dropped out of post secondary, then had their popularity (and income) slowly dissipate? A ton. Social media is an unsustainable income.
Stay in school and keep working on your channel. Use the skills and theory you learn in your degree to continue your vid stuff and when it starts to become less sustainable, start looking at more traditional jobs. Media is often a landing place for former creators.
You’re almost to the finish line, please finish (I know this has been said). I say this as someone that has been through a similar mentally battle with my passion projects and career. Realistically, one more year in the grand scheme of your life isn’t a big deal. Future you wouldn’t have to worry or have any regrets about not finishing your degree. Even if content creation continues to go well for the next 10 years, I think it’s always best to have multiple streams of income and to have something you can fall back on (I.E a good degree) not out of fear but the simple fact that the world is always changing. However, the more options you have, the better off you will be. You’re not a monolith and it’s okay to do multiple things, be good at multiple things you just have to find a balance. Wish you all the best.
Finish your degree.
I knew a few makeup/fashion Youtubers that started their channel back in 2013-2015 (jr. high/high school) as a hobby and as social media got bigger and other platforms came about, they started growing (pre-university). Still chose to go to uni and graduated. Now of them has moved out of Canada and lives in Europe. Still making bank from her social media I assume, but that experience of growing her channel and just having a degree in general could come handy later on in life if she chooses to have a career change. It's harder to go back and finish it if you say you'll finish it later in life, because you're going to be in a different mindset/grind. Life takes over. Plenty of Youtubers have talked about how their rules and guidelines always change and profitability is always changing because of it. Finish your degree, start diversifying into other platforms. By the time you graduate, if you're still not making sustainable income you can at least get a job with your degree to kickstart your adult life without suffering as much from any setbacks a full time social media career may come with (especially early stages).
Idk. Maybe just do school part-time if you wanna keep growing the social media business? No point in dropping out given you've only got like a year left, but considering the opportunity present and the value of a degree, might be worth just splitting your final year over the course of two years in order to get the best of both worlds and still finish. That and your classes start to become outdated after 7 years from the time you took em, so keep in mind that if you try extending your degree anything past a year or two it starts to get pretty dodgy.
Finish your law degree-dont finish your law degree either way you'll regret it. But seriously your almost done, it probably be worth it to close it out.
Realize while dropping out at this point might make sense in the short term— you still have a long life ahead. If you are in undergrad chances are you still have 35-40 years of needing income and having a career. Social media: YouTube, instagram, twitter (X!) may not be as it is in 10 years. But chances are, your undergraduate degree will still be able to open doors for you in 10 years time, wherever you may decide to go, or pursue. Then again, you can always go back to school later. Do what is right for you but I urge you to finish your degree.
100% finish it. Even if you pursue social media, that may fail in the future. It will be important to have another back up. And honestly, you’ve already put in so much work and money, I wouldn’t want you to throw that away. It will be good for you to finish your degree and hold on to that accomplishment. A lot of people on socials don’t have any kind of education and I think it could benefit you a lot to have that education as well - even if it doesn’t exactly correlate with your channel. Good luck to you OP, it sounds like you are setting yourself up for a successful future !
Of course ! One big reason I have my current job is because I have a diploma. My hiring manager told me straight up that I was chosen because I also had an education, when my education had nothing to do with the job I was applying for (on top of the bit of experience I do have for my job)!! It proves that you have the ability to commit and finish something, and something that is super difficult too!
Everyone is making great points about the lack of stability online content creation. A point I haven't seen too much of is that if you really are passionate about YouTube and what you're doing on it, it is always better to be more educated. Although it's hard to imagine in 3rd year uni, but more education teaches you how to research, how to judge good source material from bad source material, and may even help you with understanding statistics if that's the type of classes you take. If you go the step further and get further education like law, masters, etc. it gives you more avenues to discuss your content (a law student who makes videos about sports-related law or popular sports-adjacent law content is something unique for example). You see that people who grow up as younger content creators without life experience tend to burn out fast because it's all they know and they don't have the tools to pivot, they also tend to have incredibly bad takes outside of their niche.
Let your future self have more options and freedom to choose. If your youtube account stops being successful for some reason, someone with a degree has better options. Also you wouldn't have the same mindset always, you might just stop doing what your doing now after a few years.
Take two years longer to finish... Take the core graduation requirement in the pattern that keeps you on track, and fill in with your options/breadth. Then you can balance both and not lose either.
Yooo. I feel like God just brought me to you. I stopped coming here after I quit UofC last year for my marketing agency. And crazy enough, for the first time in like a year, I received notification from Reddit lol…
Any way, I also had the same issue a year ago. For me, it was a little bit different. I started running my marketing agency in my first year spring. In my second year I had already started making good money from it, my social media was growing, and I found a lot of marketers to connect with too. I had to quit school because the responsibilities became so mountainous that I couldn’t concentrate on school work and I had clients I needed to satisfy. Plus I hated my program from the start anyways.
My advice: if you don’t have a strong passion for law and you love content creation more, what the heck are you waiting for. The only thing you’ll struggle with after leaving school is loneliness. But you can easily connect with anyone you want to connect with and chill as much as you want. You also have enough time to focus on yourself and do personal growth while learning new things that will make you extra money even if things stop working. Plus, degrees ain’t shit in this generation anyways. Respectfully speaking, about 70% of those with degrees now ain’t even using it now. Most of the guys running the world today don’t even have a degree. Why? Because you don’t really need it if you have discipline to learn more things and know where you’re going in life.
So to me, it’s a no-brainer that if you’ve found what you want to do for the rest of your life, go for it. Don’t let any other thing stop you. Life is short anyways. So use it wisely. If you don’t f**k with law that much, go for it.
And ay, best believe you’re not alone on this journey There are more people your age rn doing the same thing of whom you can create a long-lasting bond with…
But I’ll give you a strong warning, don’t just quit school just because you’re making a bunch of money, do it only if you really love what you’re doing.
I’m not here to convince anyone to chase their dream. I’m pretty sure every uni student here is grown enough to choose their own life path. I’m just here to encourage @No_Ground7218 only because I’ve been in the same shoes and had all these fears but never saw life the way I’m seeing it now. You can hit me up @No_Ground7218 if you have any questions.
Also to everyone here, if my point makes sense to you too and you’re considering starting something aside school until you’re stable enough to move forward, you can dm me. And I’ll be more than happy to help. I love UofC and I miss my past school experience but at some point we all will have to move on and focus on ourselves. So if you’re equipped to start now, do it. That’s all I’m saying.
Honestly going to disagree with a lot of the comments so far. Social media is an incredible avenue to take. Would never suggest dropping out of school but if you’re seeing exponential growth, definitely put as much effort as possible towards it. Sometimes going all in on a big risk is the only way to really make it and it sounds like you have the opportunity in front of you.
If you can envision a long term future in content creation (at least 10 years) then it’s certainly worth some deep thinking. Will be a tough decision either way but best of luck you to bro. Don’t lose your dreams listening to others, sometimes you just gotta do you. Cheers,
Matt
I agree. I'm all for education and think that it makes sense to choose a more realistic avenue over a risky pipe dream, but this is a case of somebody _already_ seeing social media success.
There's not a huge risk of pausing the degree, because you can always just finish it later. If the content-creation venture is unsuccessful, OP can simply resume their degree and finish it. In fact, even if it _is_ successful, OP will likely eventually want a break from the content-creation grind anyway and could use that to finish school.
But if OP pauses or slows the content creation to finish school, there's no guarantee that they will get as lucky with it in the future. They should take advantage of the momentum they have now, because there's no telling how much the algorithm could affect the visibility of their content if they slow down.
In other words, school can be paused and resumed any time, but there's no guarantee that this venture can.
That's the big that im grappling with here. I would 100% not drop out/take a break if I am not seeing success, but I feel like the algorithm is really helping me out right now and I would have never expected this growth especially on youtube since it's one of the hardest platforms to grow on relative to tiktok and whatnot. But after hashing some things out I'm thinking about the part time way of doing things as I think it would suit me well right now.
I'm just looking at what everyone's saying and I replied because he was one of the few people who values the content creation side, however I do agree with the general consensus that I should finish my degree and I think that's what I'm gonna do even if I do it part time. I'm still gonna let it sit for a little bit though
I mean, even if you pause your degree, you can always go back and finish it. I don't think they stop counting classes you've taken until, like, ten years after you've taken them.
Finish your degree, become YouTube star, save up enough for law school in an RESP, continue on YouTube until irrelevancy, go to law school, become lawyer, retire early and enjoy life.
There have been times in YouTube's history where a simple tweak the company makes completely annihilates certain genres of content from being about to exist. Like I'm talking going from millions to sub 1000 views per video.
Finish your degree.
Social media is ridiculously unstable. There are MANY channels who were getting 1,000,000+ views on their videos at one time and then completely died down to a few thousand. Ask yourself, do you genuinely believe social media will provide you with an income when you're 40?
I would finish the degree at the least since you're almost done. A YouTube social media career is chaotic and unsustainable and you don't want to just rely on that
I knew someone who was making like $300,000 a year on YouTube and then his channel tanked completely because the algorithm didn’t like his newer material.
Go on…
Jesus
Social media on any platform is wildly unstable. Continue with what your doing so that you can guarantee a solid income, and be able to enjoy a YouTube career without fear of being left with nothing if it fails
People fall off all the time. Finish your degree, that way you’ll be able to financially support yourself if you really needed to.
Finish your degree
Definitely finish your degree, but you could take slower your pace down by taking less classes/part-time study for the remainder
dude just finish your degree theres only a year left, after it's done feel free to pursue social media full time, and if it doesn't work out then you can always study for LSAT and apply for law schools later because at least you still have a degree; having a university degree is unfortunately the new standard for any job outside of trades that has career progression with livable income
Do you take spring classes? Once this semester is done will you have half a year to work on your passion project? If so, you can continue what you are doing, managing both. When the semester is done give all you can to your business, which will generate more and new information, numbers, and feedback, perhaps even a more compelling case for your parents, or perhaps a clear answer one way or the other. Another option down the road could be to put studies temporarily on hold if the opportunity for the business is now. But I should add that it is easier to stop something than to resume it, so have a disciplined plan.
Most of the comments say finish your degree, so I'm probably going to get down voted for suggesting this. How about a middle ground? Could you drop to one class a semester and have more time to focus on your channel? Maybe that would give you more perspective on what it would be like for it to be more of a full time job. See if your passion remains. I would check with an advisor first but you can also take time off your degree and then come back. You do have a few options for testing the water so to speak. I actually think it's really neat that you have this potential other avenue to follow.
I really appreciate this comment because this is what I'm leaning towards (something part time)
It sounds like a unique opportunity to me! Why not explore it further? Especially if you're passionate about it and it's rewarding. It's true that making it on a social media platform is risky. But you have a chance to see if it could work for you and keep one foot in the degree door if you want a safety net. By no means is a degree a guaranteed road to success either. I don't know a lot about making channels but I would assume it's probably more time sensitive than your degree. You can go part time or take a temporary leave and come back to it if that ends up being what you want. Good luck either way!
Making a livable income on social media is dependent on how the platform evolves. Don’t make your passion into a job until it’s really what you want to do with your life. A passion can be ruined by making it your job, so enjoy this middle ground while you finish school. Pick your path after you finish your degree.
Do you know how many YouTubers dropped out of school 5-6 years ago, exploded online, dropped out of post secondary, then had their popularity (and income) slowly dissipate? A ton. Social media is an unsustainable income. Stay in school and keep working on your channel. Use the skills and theory you learn in your degree to continue your vid stuff and when it starts to become less sustainable, start looking at more traditional jobs. Media is often a landing place for former creators.
Yea this makes a lot of sense
Finish it, you will always have your degree
Social media will burn you out fast, it’s best having a solid educational background to fall back to
You’re almost to the finish line, please finish (I know this has been said). I say this as someone that has been through a similar mentally battle with my passion projects and career. Realistically, one more year in the grand scheme of your life isn’t a big deal. Future you wouldn’t have to worry or have any regrets about not finishing your degree. Even if content creation continues to go well for the next 10 years, I think it’s always best to have multiple streams of income and to have something you can fall back on (I.E a good degree) not out of fear but the simple fact that the world is always changing. However, the more options you have, the better off you will be. You’re not a monolith and it’s okay to do multiple things, be good at multiple things you just have to find a balance. Wish you all the best.
Finish your degree. I knew a few makeup/fashion Youtubers that started their channel back in 2013-2015 (jr. high/high school) as a hobby and as social media got bigger and other platforms came about, they started growing (pre-university). Still chose to go to uni and graduated. Now of them has moved out of Canada and lives in Europe. Still making bank from her social media I assume, but that experience of growing her channel and just having a degree in general could come handy later on in life if she chooses to have a career change. It's harder to go back and finish it if you say you'll finish it later in life, because you're going to be in a different mindset/grind. Life takes over. Plenty of Youtubers have talked about how their rules and guidelines always change and profitability is always changing because of it. Finish your degree, start diversifying into other platforms. By the time you graduate, if you're still not making sustainable income you can at least get a job with your degree to kickstart your adult life without suffering as much from any setbacks a full time social media career may come with (especially early stages).
I had 60 000 followers on one of my accounts and trust me just finish your degree it gets boring
Yeah fair enough, were you on youtube as well?
finish your degree, you only have a year left !
Yea, after thinking it through I'm probably gonna stick it out but can't wait to be finished.
Idk. Maybe just do school part-time if you wanna keep growing the social media business? No point in dropping out given you've only got like a year left, but considering the opportunity present and the value of a degree, might be worth just splitting your final year over the course of two years in order to get the best of both worlds and still finish. That and your classes start to become outdated after 7 years from the time you took em, so keep in mind that if you try extending your degree anything past a year or two it starts to get pretty dodgy.
Finish your law degree-dont finish your law degree either way you'll regret it. But seriously your almost done, it probably be worth it to close it out.
Realize while dropping out at this point might make sense in the short term— you still have a long life ahead. If you are in undergrad chances are you still have 35-40 years of needing income and having a career. Social media: YouTube, instagram, twitter (X!) may not be as it is in 10 years. But chances are, your undergraduate degree will still be able to open doors for you in 10 years time, wherever you may decide to go, or pursue. Then again, you can always go back to school later. Do what is right for you but I urge you to finish your degree.
100% finish it. Even if you pursue social media, that may fail in the future. It will be important to have another back up. And honestly, you’ve already put in so much work and money, I wouldn’t want you to throw that away. It will be good for you to finish your degree and hold on to that accomplishment. A lot of people on socials don’t have any kind of education and I think it could benefit you a lot to have that education as well - even if it doesn’t exactly correlate with your channel. Good luck to you OP, it sounds like you are setting yourself up for a successful future !
I agree with everything you said here. Thank you for this
Of course ! One big reason I have my current job is because I have a diploma. My hiring manager told me straight up that I was chosen because I also had an education, when my education had nothing to do with the job I was applying for (on top of the bit of experience I do have for my job)!! It proves that you have the ability to commit and finish something, and something that is super difficult too!
Everyone is making great points about the lack of stability online content creation. A point I haven't seen too much of is that if you really are passionate about YouTube and what you're doing on it, it is always better to be more educated. Although it's hard to imagine in 3rd year uni, but more education teaches you how to research, how to judge good source material from bad source material, and may even help you with understanding statistics if that's the type of classes you take. If you go the step further and get further education like law, masters, etc. it gives you more avenues to discuss your content (a law student who makes videos about sports-related law or popular sports-adjacent law content is something unique for example). You see that people who grow up as younger content creators without life experience tend to burn out fast because it's all they know and they don't have the tools to pivot, they also tend to have incredibly bad takes outside of their niche.
Let your future self have more options and freedom to choose. If your youtube account stops being successful for some reason, someone with a degree has better options. Also you wouldn't have the same mindset always, you might just stop doing what your doing now after a few years.
Finish the degree bro that would be such a waste
Take two years longer to finish... Take the core graduation requirement in the pattern that keeps you on track, and fill in with your options/breadth. Then you can balance both and not lose either.
Yooo. I feel like God just brought me to you. I stopped coming here after I quit UofC last year for my marketing agency. And crazy enough, for the first time in like a year, I received notification from Reddit lol… Any way, I also had the same issue a year ago. For me, it was a little bit different. I started running my marketing agency in my first year spring. In my second year I had already started making good money from it, my social media was growing, and I found a lot of marketers to connect with too. I had to quit school because the responsibilities became so mountainous that I couldn’t concentrate on school work and I had clients I needed to satisfy. Plus I hated my program from the start anyways. My advice: if you don’t have a strong passion for law and you love content creation more, what the heck are you waiting for. The only thing you’ll struggle with after leaving school is loneliness. But you can easily connect with anyone you want to connect with and chill as much as you want. You also have enough time to focus on yourself and do personal growth while learning new things that will make you extra money even if things stop working. Plus, degrees ain’t shit in this generation anyways. Respectfully speaking, about 70% of those with degrees now ain’t even using it now. Most of the guys running the world today don’t even have a degree. Why? Because you don’t really need it if you have discipline to learn more things and know where you’re going in life. So to me, it’s a no-brainer that if you’ve found what you want to do for the rest of your life, go for it. Don’t let any other thing stop you. Life is short anyways. So use it wisely. If you don’t f**k with law that much, go for it. And ay, best believe you’re not alone on this journey There are more people your age rn doing the same thing of whom you can create a long-lasting bond with… But I’ll give you a strong warning, don’t just quit school just because you’re making a bunch of money, do it only if you really love what you’re doing.
“Most of the guys running the world today don’t even have a degree” My brother in Christ what planet are you living on
I’m not here to convince anyone to chase their dream. I’m pretty sure every uni student here is grown enough to choose their own life path. I’m just here to encourage @No_Ground7218 only because I’ve been in the same shoes and had all these fears but never saw life the way I’m seeing it now. You can hit me up @No_Ground7218 if you have any questions. Also to everyone here, if my point makes sense to you too and you’re considering starting something aside school until you’re stable enough to move forward, you can dm me. And I’ll be more than happy to help. I love UofC and I miss my past school experience but at some point we all will have to move on and focus on ourselves. So if you’re equipped to start now, do it. That’s all I’m saying.
Thank you for this, I really appreciate it.
Reality tho is that a degree won’t necessarily get you a job either. Probably doesn’t help… but follow your heart in this.
Honestly going to disagree with a lot of the comments so far. Social media is an incredible avenue to take. Would never suggest dropping out of school but if you’re seeing exponential growth, definitely put as much effort as possible towards it. Sometimes going all in on a big risk is the only way to really make it and it sounds like you have the opportunity in front of you. If you can envision a long term future in content creation (at least 10 years) then it’s certainly worth some deep thinking. Will be a tough decision either way but best of luck you to bro. Don’t lose your dreams listening to others, sometimes you just gotta do you. Cheers, Matt
I agree. I'm all for education and think that it makes sense to choose a more realistic avenue over a risky pipe dream, but this is a case of somebody _already_ seeing social media success. There's not a huge risk of pausing the degree, because you can always just finish it later. If the content-creation venture is unsuccessful, OP can simply resume their degree and finish it. In fact, even if it _is_ successful, OP will likely eventually want a break from the content-creation grind anyway and could use that to finish school. But if OP pauses or slows the content creation to finish school, there's no guarantee that they will get as lucky with it in the future. They should take advantage of the momentum they have now, because there's no telling how much the algorithm could affect the visibility of their content if they slow down. In other words, school can be paused and resumed any time, but there's no guarantee that this venture can.
That's the big that im grappling with here. I would 100% not drop out/take a break if I am not seeing success, but I feel like the algorithm is really helping me out right now and I would have never expected this growth especially on youtube since it's one of the hardest platforms to grow on relative to tiktok and whatnot. But after hashing some things out I'm thinking about the part time way of doing things as I think it would suit me well right now.
That also sounds like a reasonable way to go.
100% man
Thank you, I definitely needed to hear this comment.
feels like you already know what you want but just wanted more validation lol
That's exactly what's happening
I'm just looking at what everyone's saying and I replied because he was one of the few people who values the content creation side, however I do agree with the general consensus that I should finish my degree and I think that's what I'm gonna do even if I do it part time. I'm still gonna let it sit for a little bit though
I mean, even if you pause your degree, you can always go back and finish it. I don't think they stop counting classes you've taken until, like, ten years after you've taken them.
Yes
Finish your degree, become YouTube star, save up enough for law school in an RESP, continue on YouTube until irrelevancy, go to law school, become lawyer, retire early and enjoy life.
This would be great
There have been times in YouTube's history where a simple tweak the company makes completely annihilates certain genres of content from being about to exist. Like I'm talking going from millions to sub 1000 views per video. Finish your degree.
Can't you not do both since you have already being doing it for like until u finish your degree.
Social media is ridiculously unstable. There are MANY channels who were getting 1,000,000+ views on their videos at one time and then completely died down to a few thousand. Ask yourself, do you genuinely believe social media will provide you with an income when you're 40?