SoFi Blog

Is there a dream that you tabled years ago and having been meaning to revisit? Maybe you aspired to write the Great American Novel, but became accustomed to the office lifestyle. Or perhaps you’ve toyed with the idea of taking a mid-career break at 40 to lay on a beach in Ibiza or hike the Appalachian Trail. More people are taking a sabbatical or mid-career break in their 30s and 40s, whether to pursue personal passions, travel, volunteer, or consider a career shift.

Welcome to Hey Coach!, a career advice column hosted by SoFi’s Career Advisory Group, a team of expert career coaches dedicated to helping SoFi members reach professional success. Got a tricky career question of your own? Email [email protected].

Hey Coach,

My husband and I have made the decision to move across the country so we can live closer to our families in the Bay Area. We’ve been living in New York for the last ten years and have really planted roots—great friends, families and jobs—but we’re looking to start a family of our own soon and know being closer to loved ones is the right choice.

There are lots of good reasons to become a doctor. Being a physician means you can help people in one of the most direct ways possible: By doing your best to restore their health. An added bonus is you can eventually make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing it; Medscape’s 2016 physician compensation report found that the lowest-earning doctors (pediatricians and endocrinologists) bring in around $200,000 a year, while the highest earners (orthopedists and cardiologists) make over $400,000.

When I was laid off from my corporate marketing gig in the fall of 2015, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back to the handcuffed existence I’d spent so much time working within.

One day, while surfing the internet, I saw a part-time internship listing for a local fitness company. Even though I knew my eight years of work experience and MBA made me overqualified, I applied. My thought was that it seemed fun and could bring in a paycheck while I figured things out. As luck would have it, the owner agreed to hire me (with a Director of Marketing title, no less) for five hours a week of work.

If you just graduated from nursing school, personal finance is probably the last thing on your mind. You’ve burned the midnight oil memorizing medical terms that sound like a foreign language. You’ve put in rough clinical hours dealing with trying patients. You’re cramming for the NCLEX. And you’re ready to get out there and just do the job.

You might be thinking, “I went to school for a solid career, so the money will take care of itself.” Nurses do make pretty good salaries—you’re not wrong about that. In 2016, on average nurse practitioner made nearly $105,000 a year, registered nurses made more than $72,000, and practical and vocational nurses made $44,000. Demand for nurses of all stripes is growing, with the number of positions expected to increase between 16 and 31%, depending on the role, in the decade through 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.