 Medical school was four years of my life and put me into over a hundred and ninety thousand dollars in debt. It says I'm going to be sharing with you the things that I did right to actually make some money to minimize that debt. Now it's important to note that while we'll talk about some of the jobs that I did in medical school I've been working for a good majority of my teenage years. My first job happened to be in Chuck E Cheese. And as embarrassing as it is, yes, at times I did have to get into that ridiculous mouse costume dancing for a birthday party just to get about seven dollars an hour. And while the pay at that time was essentially nothing, it did teach me the importance of essentially working for what I wanted. Whether it was to invest or buy something, I always had a job all the way from high school to college. I actually even had a full-time position before starting medical school as a behavioral therapist working with autistic kids. So I've been working for quite a amount. So having some kind of income was very natural to me. So when I started medical school I knew that I still wanted to be ideally making some income even while studying. So the first thing that I had to do is to find a steady friendly job. Obviously being a medical student is a full-time job in itself. Very difficult to manage a part-time position unless that position allows you to do some studying on the job. Luckily for me, my medical school had a recreation center associated with a med school, the PhD, and all the hospitals. And so you always had doctors, students, PhD candidates coming out to work out, play basketball, and they always needed somebody to manage the front desk. That was my first job in medical school, essentially being that front desk person. All I really had to do was just check people in, if they wanted to buy a few snacks, I could ring them up on a cashier, fold a few pieces of laundry every few hours, and make a few rounds just to make sure the gym and everything was clean. That was basically it. And those shifts happened to be anywhere from five to eight hours. Sometimes it would take one to two shifts a month. And if I had a rotation that was very nice, I may take four or five shifts and over the span of three to four years of medical school, that came out to about two to three thousand dollars. In addition to working the front desk, working at the recreation center, I also found other opportunities. For example, there's always sports going on on a weekly basis. And sometimes it would need somebody to do things like keep score and manage the shot clot on a basketball game or be a referee. So again, over the span of four years of medical school, I also added up to a nice 2k. Now, after exhausting all of those study-friendly physicians in the recreation center, the next thing that I did in medical school was tutoring. Now, there is a lot of opportunity and money to be made. If you're one good at a particular subject and then two, definitely good at teaching it. So for example, my fourth year of medical school, I signed up to be an anatomy tutor. And thankfully, I was approved for the position. And that job paid me very, very well. My role as an anatomy TA was once or twice a week. I would pretty much have to be familiar with dissections that the first year medical students would be doing, be able to show up to lab a little bit earlier just to prep, be around for all their questions, be able to show different structures, essentially know what I was looking for, be able to do some teaching, and then afterwards just kind of help clean up. I think at the rate at that time, it was about 25 to 30 dollars an hour. Most labs are about four hours. And sometimes I would just do one to two dissection labs a week, but really the money for being anatomy TA came to doing one on one tutoring. Now, thankfully, my institution had a very structured program of where first year medical students could go to anatomy TA like myself and say, Hey, by the way, I really like how you teach on dissection day. I'd love to have some one on one tutoring time because, by the way, we have a test in the upcoming week. Those were nice. They paid about $40 an hour. I could essentially just teach a group of four students show them all the structures that they're interested in. And I would often stack multiple of these sessions on a weekend where I would do maybe four to five of them. So I could easily walk out of an anatomy dissection day or a one on one tutoring with $200 on the Saturday, $200 on the Sunday and repeat this for several weeks up to an upcoming exam. So in the span of just a few months as a fourth year medical student, where I was spending a lot of my time going on interviews for residency, so I had a lot of time off to actually do some tutoring, I made about $5,000. Similar to being an anatomy TA and knowing that one, I like to teach and two that had paid well as a fourth year medical student, I also decided to be a astrology TA. Basically all I had to do was great homework, be able to kind of walk around for study sessions when the students had questions, and then be able to grade things for the exams. This was a class I wasn't as interested in, but even working just a few hours, I was able to easily make one to $2,000. And so far, these are the rules that I took that had a very typical show for a certain amount of hours will pay you for it. Now let's talk about things that I did in medical school that naturally didn't always correlate with my time, but were able to provide me an income that I could use to pay out that med school debt. Now getting scholarships in medical school personally was much difficult compared to college, I was able to pay it for pretty much 80 to 90% of my college tuition using a variety of scholarships, not the same case in medical school. Although I was able to get awarded some scholarships, it was just really competitive and most students all have some kind of financial need, so it's very easy to take on a six-figure debt. But thankfully I was awarded a few scholarships on both merit and financial needs perspective, and I was able to get a total of $10,000 in scholarships over my four years in medical school. There's one thing that I wish I did more of early as a medical student or definitely when I was applying to medical school, I wish I had been more proactive and applied to more scholarships, even if that was an extra two to three thousand dollars every year, that can make a big difference when you add up the interest and all the years of training that you don't pay off your debt. Next up is starting a side hustle. Now this is something I completely fell into by accident. Starting the MD journey was just a blog where I intended to write blog posts on how I was doing so my family and friends knew how difficult medical school was. And strangers like you guys found those posts and found them to be very helpful, so I continued to write based off of recommendations and questions that you had and I was able to make a few bucks here and I continued to grow over the span of the four years of medical school plus three years of residency. And as I began to see the momentum and the interest and what we were doing here at the MD journey rise, I was able to learn more about business and just being able to line how to provide value to possibly being able to also create an income with the business that is now the MD journey today. And so in terms of how much this side business was able to make me, I started the MD journey as a second year medical student pretty much didn't make any money for my first year and a half. I just kind of did this because I was interested and I enjoyed the project and then I was able to see a small income all the way to my fourth year of medical school where I had something a lot more structured. I had a few ebooks that a lot of you guys may have checked out. Again the Domination Bundle is linked down below in case you're interested. But I wrote those when I was in medical school and put tons of tons of hours putting together these very comprehensive guides that I wish somebody had given to me. But over the span of those three years of medical school I was ultimately able to make an extra $20,000 to $30,000 using a side hustle. Now keep in mind that's easily included hundreds of hours of writing, editing, variety of things that you guys may never saw because the ultimate product sucks. I just scratched it. But if I had to take all that income over the hours that I've made, I probably was making less minimum wage at that time, but ultimately created a project that is now the MD journey today. And so if you at all have some kind of aspiration to do something entrepreneurial, to create something and just kind of see what comes out of it, what grows requiring a lot of hard work and may not pan out, definitely consider trying out a side hustle that basically combines one of your interests with something that could make you a little bit of money. Again, it will require a lot of hours, but if it does work out with the MD journey has, then you have a great side product that you can easily go to. It provides a lot of balance and obviously thankfully a good amount of income. And then finally my last bit of income came from investments. Now keep in mind I've been working all the way from that terrible job at 16 at Techie Keys to some basic jobs in college to a full-time position for one year before starting medical school as a behavioral therapist for autistic kids. So I had built up thankfully a lot of income and the entire time between my first job in high school all the way to starting medical school and having that full-time position, I was living at home. So my cost for rent was zero. My cost for food was very low. And I was pretty much investing a majority of that money. Now if you guys are interested in where my investments and money went, happily can break that down in a future episode. Just go ahead and comment down below. Most of my money went into index funds over this span of again, six to seven years before starting medical school and that full-time job, majority of it, pretty much all of it went into the stock market. And it was by far one of the best things I could have done for myself because I gave myself a nest egg that could easily access if I needed to. Again, medical school is expensive. I easily remember waiting for my loan money to come in and still having to pay for a one $2,000 license exam before the payment came in and having to sell a few stocks briefly to be able to make that payment. I also wanted to come up with the money to help pay for my wedding. Obviously Indian weddings are by no means cheap. My wife and I made the decision to get married after I finished medical school before starting residency. And so knowing that it's going to be a very expensive wedding, I also wanted to pitch in for both of our parents to thankfully over the span of eight years of the stock portfolio growing, I was able to dip into some of the growth to be able to offload some of that wedding costs. And so overall through investments, I was able to make an extra $15 to $20,000. So putting all of that together through my job at working in the front desk of the rec center, working as a referee or as a score keeper, as well as my TA's jobs and both anatomy and astrology, adding in my scholarships, my side hustles as well as investment incomes comes out to about a total of $69,000 over four years of medical school. Now there's a lot of luck and good fortune as well as good decision making way before medical school even started that was able to help me get to that number. By no means should you be expecting to make that much over the four years of medical school, maybe a little less, but most students will probably have just a few thousand dollars that they get from a part time job during medical school and that is completely okay. The purpose of today's episode is to understand that there are tons of different options to help you offload that debt if you are interested. By no means do you have to, you can just focus on studying and understanding that the harder you study now, the likely you'll have the career that you want and ideally a better salary. But if you're somebody like me who's been working a majority of their life and always made sense to find a little bit of income while still working hard in school, it is very much possible. Now keep in mind that none of this would have been possible if I didn't know how to study or manage my time. If those first two things were mastered, it wouldn't have mattered what kind of job I wanted. I simply would have been doing too poorly in medical school to succeed at both of them. Thankfully, I had the academic success first and then found that extra bit of time to add those income producing task or jobs. But if you're at a position where you're currently struggling academically or struggling how to manage your time, I wouldn't go ahead and recommend adding a part time position because it's just going to add a lot of stress and anxiety and likely your performance is going to dip. And if you want to help improving how you study or your efficiency, we have tons of resources for you here on the YouTube channel as well as the podcast, as well as the link down below. You can find a ton of other free resources, including our Med School Success Handbook, where I talk about how to study better, how to be more productive against absolutely free. And if you want an entire blueprint on how to just crush it on every phase of the medical journey, I highly recommend checking out the Medical School Domination Bundle, which has now been used by hundreds of students over the past few years. But with that being said, guys, I love talking about personal finance and making money or just paying off debt because those are topics that unfortunately they just don't teach us very well in medical school. So there's any lingering questions, go ahead and add them down below in the comment section down below. But if you enjoyed today's episode, then check out this episode right here on how much debt I'm in for medical school and how I plan on paying it off, as well as this one right here on how much doctors make in the US. Hopefully you guys enjoy these. And as always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little helped to you guys on yours. And I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.