These film school grads ditched studio jobs for YouTube and TikTok. How's that going?

Adrienne Finch had a tough choice to make. After leaving Loyola Marymount University in 2015, her screenwriting degree in hand, she secured an opportunity many film school grads would salivate over: a job offer from Warner Bros.

But although the publicity assistant position was the sort of entry-level role that young creatives often take out of college to wedge their foot in the entertainment industry's door, spending the next five years as an assistant seemed unfulfilling.

Finch instead opted to follow a different path into the limelight — one that, in the mid-2010s, was only just starting to take shape.

She became a creator on social media.

Finch already had several friends who were making money on YouTube, and following in their footsteps seemed like a way to circumvent several years of early-career dues-paying. So she turned down the Warner Bros. gig and instead took a job