I remember when my cousin (who is a few years older than I am) decided to drop out of college and go to Massage school. My whole family thought she was crazy. She was a junior in college (at a very good and expensive school) and she was a psychology major. Then one day over break she saw an ad for a massage school and decided that she wanted to do that instead. She told her parents and they were mad of course at first. She had spent all of that time (3 years) and their money on school and it seemed like she was just going to blow it away in about 15 minutes.

So she looked up everything about massage on Wikipedia and searched for schools and finally convinced her parents to let her go over the summer (after she completed the rest of her junior year at the school she was currently in) to see how she felt about it. She enrolled in a summer session at the massage school and she loved it. I think her parents thought it was a joke kind of and they gave her about 3 weeks in it before they thought she would be crying to them to send her back to school. But she actually learned a lot and over the course of the summer her parents saw how much she was learning and how much she liked it.

I think us all kind of thought this was a joke and that it would blow over but now she has a job as a massage therapist at her own place and she makes a lot of money. The best part is that she's doing something she loves and she's helping people. She also volunteers her time (and hands) to help give massages to parents of kids who are in the hospital with serious illnesses. These parents sit in hospitals for days on end with their kids and don't really have a good bed to sleep in when they are there and they are so stressed out. So she gets to help out the people in need and it really makes her (and my aunt and uncle) feel good about her decision to drop out of college. She even met a doctor and has been dating him for awhile now while she was volunteering. And none of this would have happened if she hadn't taken that chance.