The job market is rough. Grad school is expensive. Starting something small (or, not so small in my case) on the side might be more viable than you think.

You're somewhere in the middle of your program — maybe internship year, maybe just approaching it — and the math stopped working a while ago.

Tuition. Supervision fees. Exam costs. And now your program is sending signals, subtle or not, that it's time to scale back your hours at work. Maybe quit entirely. Just... stop. As if your student loans got the memo. As if rent decided to be flexible.

This is the part nobody really prepares you for. Not the clinical load. You expected that. The financial squeeze that comes with it.

I'm not going to tell you entrepreneurship is the answer. It's not the right move for everyone, and I'll say that clearly. But I do think it's an option that doesn't get named enough, and for some people, it's not just viable. It's the thing that keeps them in the field long enough to actually practice.

The Setup Nobody Talks About

By internship, you're doing the hardest clinical work of your training, often for little or no pay. You're paying for supervision. You're studying for exams. And if you were working a job before (the kind that actually paid your bills) there’s a decent chance your program is signaling, directly or indirectly, that it's time to let that go.

The assumption baked into a lot of programs is that you have someone else covering your expenses, or savings to draw from, or a financial situation flexible enough to absorb all of this. A lot of people don't have that. And the ones who don't feel like they're failing at something, when really they're just being asked to absorb costs the system refuses to acknowledge.

(If you want the numbers behind this, I wrote about it here.)

So What Does "One Alternative" Actually Look Like?

Not starting a private practice. Not launching a six-figure coaching business. Not becoming a content creator with a ring light and a brand deal. Something smaller. Something that fits inside a life that's already full.

The version I'm talking about is finding something you're already good at, something that doesn't draw from the same well as your clinical work, and getting paid for it on your own terms.

That might look like freelance work in something you could do half-asleep. Writing, design, tutoring, social media, bookkeeping… whatever you were doing before school that people kept asking you to do for them.

It might look like a small service for a niche you already understand. You're a therapist-in-training. You know things about mental health, communication, and human behavior that other people would genuinely pay to learn from.

The one rule I'd give it: low cognitive load. You're already carrying a lot. Whatever you build on the side shouldn't require the same part of your brain as your clinical work. It should feel lighter, not heavier — otherwise it's just a second job with extra steps.

The goal isn't an empire. It's breathing room. Income that doesn't disappear when your internship hours go up, that doesn't require you to take whatever job will have you, that belongs to you.

Why This Is Also a Little Bit of a Power Move

The mental health training system is structured in a way that keeps you financially dependent — on programs, on employers, on supervisors — for a very long time. That dependency is not an accident. And for a lot of people, especially those without financial safety nets, it's the reason they leave the field before they ever get to do the work they came here to do.

Building something on the side, even something small, is a way of opting out of some of that dependency. It doesn't fix the system. But it gives you options. And options change how you make decisions. About which jobs you take, which supervisors you work with, how long you're willing to wait out a bad situation. That's not nothing.

This Isn't for Everyone. Here's How to Know.

If the idea of adding one more thing to your plate makes you want to close this tab, that's information. You might be at capacity, or in a season where survival is the whole job. That's okay.

But if you find yourself thinking: I've been doing [thing] for years and people always tell me I should charge for it, that's also information. That might be the low-cognitive-load thing. That might be worth a second look.

You don't have to build something big. You don't have to have it figured out. You just have to be honest about whether the path you're on is actually sustainable, and whether there's a version of this that works a little better for you.

Where to Start

If you're in grad school or pre-licensure and you want to start something small, the most useful first question isn't "what should I build." It's: what do I already do that other people find valuable, that doesn't leave me depleted?

Start there. Everything else can come after.

And if part of what you're building is eventually a private practice, the online presence piece matters more than most people realize. Your future clients are already searching.

Ashley Rhoden is a former corporate marketing leader turned strategist and website designer who works with therapists and private practice owners ready to stop being invisible online. She's also a grad student in a counseling program — not a therapist, not pre-licensed, just someone who understands this world from both the marketing side and the inside of a counseling program, and brings both to every website she builds.

Work with her to build a website that’s as unique as your sessions are. →