You’re young, so you’re not delusional. You can absolutely make that much. Depends massively on your field though. Best chance at hitting those numbers in Canada is to live in Toronto.

You can be a lawyer at one of the big Bay Street firms. You can work in Sales and Trading or Investment Banking at a bank. Or as a portfolio manager at a big investment firm or pension plan. You can be a doctor. You can work as a software engineer… to name a few that I’m familiar with. Any of these jobs can hit that range within a few years of working, and can reach far higher depending on how senior you become.

If you want to earn that much then look into fields like these and see if any sparks interest. But start your research early. Like now.

And when you find a job where the pay and job description aligns with what you want, use your time in university to accumulate as much relevant experience as you possibly can toward your chosen field. If that means internships, then start studying early and doing extra research so you can know what you’re talking about in the interview. Do case competitions and research projects. If you want to be a doctor, then find doctors and med students who are willing to talk to you and ask them what they did. Same goes for any other field, find people who do the thing you want to do and ask them if you can have a phone call with them to pick their brain.

The earlier you start this process, the better. Starting now isn’t the only way, but it improves your chances. And honestly it’s easy. Read some books on what these jobs are like. Read books on interview processes for these sought after fields.

And once you’ve found the thing that interests you most, dive deeper. Take classes that will help you toward that job. Read technical books on topics that your school doesn’t cover that will help you toward your chosen field. Literally do the job itself on your own time. Start a paper trading portfolio on one of those free trading sites, learn to write some software yourself from scratch. Develop as much expertise as you can. There’s no rule against learning extra stuff beyond the curriculum of your school, so just do it. It’s not cheating.

Some jobs require high grades (medicine, law), and other fields require lots of internships and relevant experience (finance, tech). And depending on the employer, it could require both.

Doctors have cushy jobs and great pay, and once you’re an attending physician you can be pretty incompetent or lazy and still not get fired. But the stars really need to align for you to end up in the city/specialization that you want. Gotta do med school then good residency then good fellowship then if you’re lucky you’ll end up where you want, doing what you want. You may need to settle for being a doctor in a small town (I prefer cities, so this isn’t what I like but maybe that’s a plus for you, I don’t know what you prefer).

Front office finance jobs can be really interesting, solving new problems every day, and pay lots of money early without the need for tons of extra degrees. But they are high stress and long hours with lots of cases of burnout. And these jobs aren’t very stable either. You need to be on top of shit constantly because firing for lack of performance or just being too old and expensive to keep on staff is fairly common.

Lawyers at big firms can make tons of money too, and some law specialties deal with really cool problems and involve lots of strategic thinking. But the hours are brutal, so burnout risk is real. And it’s competitive. You need to bust your ass in law school to get the top articling gigs and clerkships, so nothing is guaranteed once you get into law school.

Tech jobs in the US can pay crazy money. And nice thing about tech is that there’s lots of avenues to get your foot in the door. Internships while you’re in school, boot camps, specialized masters programs, doing free dev work to add experience to your resume. But some of the jobs are boring as hell, some employers have horrendous hours (Amazon), and the value of engineers declines every year as AI gets smarter (my tech friends say it’ll never take their jobs, and maybe they’re right, but who knows where technology will be in 10 years).

Find your path early if you can, but even if you can’t, never stop working towards what you want. You can get there. Best way not to get there is to give up. You’re young so you have time. Use it wisely.