New member Northern Utah

[Jaden Cook]

Hi everyone! What a great website! I stumbled upon BiggerPockets while browsing the web for budgeting ideas. My name is Jaden. I currently live in northern Utah. I am a 24 yr old senior in college and will be graduating in the Spring.  My interest in real estate grows out of my current reevaluation of my career plans. As a brief bio, I have about a year before starting medical school. I have had to write many essays about "why medicine?". This process has caused me to pause and make sure my love of medicine is sufficient for what it will entail. Brief calculations put me in to my 40's before I am on the road to financial independence. The time between now and financial independence will be filled with extensive time away from family/hobbies/etc. Long story short, I am trying to determine if my goals of being a good father/financial independence/time to serve in the community can be fulfilled in another way besides medicine, while at the same time me being OK with not doing medicine. For those of you who are physicians, I'm sure you understand my current situation. Kudos to all your hard work!

With that background, I turn to BiggerPockets for some insight into the real estate investing world. While I have loved medicine, it doesn't quite get me excited like real estate and entrepreneurship. I ran two small (tiny) businesses in high school and I loved it. If in the end I decided to opt out of medicine, I would enthusiastically begin investing in real estate. There is plenty of highly promising/almost magical real estate investing ideas out there for beginner like me, but I tend to be very weary of things that appear too good to be true (science background here, I've been trained to be skeptical). Browsing this forum I have seen much more concrete ideas that I could take hold of, work my tail off, and find success. Thanks for reading this long post! I'm happy to be here!