Asian Influencer Earning $1 Million A Year Says She’s Quitting To Become A Doctor: “I Think Being An Influencer Is Harder Than Being A Doctor”

Reyna Nguyen is moving away from content creation to pursue a career in dermatology, even though it requires a significant pay cut.

Nguyen always dreamt of becoming a doctor and majored in bioengineering with a premedical focus at the university. However, she abandoned those plans to become financially independent more quickly and took on content creation instead.

Now, after several years of building her online career, she is ready to return to the field she originally intended to join, though this means giving up some flexibility and potentially the income she currently earns.

“I think being an influencer is harder than being a doctor,” Nguyen said. “It’s a different type of work, but I think they’re both really hard.”

Nguyen works between 10 and 14 hours a day, balancing content creation, social media, administration, management, and other aspects of running her online career. Her daily tasks include making multiple TikToks, coordinating with assistants and management teams, planning content, organizing shoots, and creating paid content.

“Every day is so different,” she said. “Last week, I had to fly my assistant over because we just had so much to do.”

“I would wake up, get ready, and then I have to make 20 TikTok videos, and they all have to be new. Then it’s admin work, checking emails, talking to assistants and management. Then planning the content day and actually setting up for each piece of content.”

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What makes Nguyen’s career different from medicine, she says, is not the amount of work but its instability.

“I don’t think [being a doctor] is going to be more relaxing, but I think it’ll be more stable, which is something I don’t really have right now,” she says.

The unpredictability of being an entrepreneur makes financial planning rather challenging for Nguyen.

“We have months where we do really well and months where we don’t do really well,” she said. “One of the most frustrating things for me is financial planning because I don’t know how much longer I can do this job for.”

“You’re stuck in this phase of being in panic constantly because you’re like, ‘Okay, I don’t know when this money is going to run out. How can I make sure I have enough to live a stable life?'”

This makes Nguyen’s choice even more understandable since she decided to return to medicine. As for her specialization, Nguyen has always been interested in skin, so she wants to become a dermatologist, combining her passion for skin with the science and technology she was originally drawn to.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor because I really like helping people,” she said. “I wanted to specifically go into dermatology because I love skin and I love how it incorporates science and technology, which is what I was studying in college anyway.”

Nguyen had also shadowed doctors and liked it.

“I shadowed doctors, and I loved it,” she recalled. “It was great.”

Pursuing medicine means several years of education and further residency, but Nguyen said she is ready to face it.

“I’m already working so much nowadays that the residency and fellowships won’t be an issue for me,” she said. “I’m already working 12- to 14-hour days.”

For Nguyen, switching to such a regulated, structured job will be easier.

“My life now is so chaotic. Every day is a new day. Something else is going on,” she said. “As a doctor, you take the knowledge you already have and apply it every single day. It’s more routine.”

Nguyen said she currently earns around $1 million a year, so switching to medicine means accepting lower pay unless she practices in the United States. She also mentioned that certain specializations in the U.S. can provide the same pay over time.

“If I practice in Australia, I’d definitely take a pay cut, but if I practice in America, it could probably be about the same, honestly,” she says.

Money isn’t what matters to her in the first place. One thing she is waiting for in the future is the ability to speak freely about her job in front of her family and feel that what she does makes a bigger difference in other people’s lives.

“I look forward to being able to be entirely open about what I do with my family,” she says.

“It would be nice to contribute more meaningfully and change people’s lives,” she adds. “Do some good in the world.”

Nguyen has wondered whether her past in the online world would influence her future in medicine, especially if patients or colleagues ever learned about her history. However, after talking to doctors who were interviewing medical candidates, she was relieved.

“I talked to some of my doctor friends who have hosted interviews for applicants, and I was talking about what angle I should use,” she said. “They just said, ‘Ignore it. Talk about the startups, talk about how you own the business.'”

Nguyen sees her long-term goal in integrating medicine with entrepreneurship rather than working as a traditional physician.

“If I own my own practice, my plan wouldn’t be to work there every single day,” she said. “It would be to open up a business and then come in two or three times a week to help and manage.”

Nguyen noted that switching to medicine is not about shying away from hard work. It is about creating a life that is more stable and meaningful.

“I don’t think it’s going to be more relaxing,” she said. “But I think it’ll be more stable.”