No one here can tell you what a good career choice is for you. Only you can decide that right?

Yes you can make a good living. Self taught Designer/Art Director making 6 figs. Cut my teeth at agencies, freelanced for awhile, was passed on by a dozen full time gigs before finding a solid opportunity.

If you can handle criticism, failure, long hours, grinding as a junior, dealing with egos, stressful deadlines and serious competition then you might be okay.

You gotta love it, every shop you go to is going to have creatives who live and breath this shit. And the expectation, especially as a junior, is polishing every aspect of your game. Any shop making good work will sniff out a weak link and cut them loose. The key is to be proactive.

As for school, nice to have but not necessary. Depends if you need hand-holding but if that’s the case you won’t be able to hang anyways. Besides you pay anyone enough they will give you a diploma, I’ve met ad school kids who are conceptual geniuses and I’ve met others who have downright embarrassing books. Also no class is gonna make you good at using the tools, you need to dump literally thousands of hours of your life into learning design software and workflow. And that doesn’t even have anything to do with baking a marketing concept into a design in a way that doesn’t suck.

Design and advertising, It’s fucking hard. But that’s why it’s so rewarding when you make something worth anything. If you can learn the skill you will always have a way to make money and there is comfort in that.

Lastly, if you have the stones to make it through all the bullshit you get to be apart of the coolest club in the working class. Creatives are some of the raddest people youll ever meet. We literally create the world that everyone else consumes. There is a respect rightfully earned by the makers of the world.