https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/law-student-earning-1-5m-200000311.html

Emily Cocea understands that her side profession is unconventional.

The 22-year-old law student, who is in her first year at the University of Michigan, has similar dreams to her peers: After she graduates, she wants to become a public defender to help some of the most underprivileged people. What distinguishes her, however, is that she rakes in an estimated $1.5 million a year from posting and selling adult content online.

Cocea first started her journey with social media out of financial necessity, she tells PEOPLE in an interview.

“The origin of the story is a little bit sad,” she says.

When she was 15, her dad died unexpectedly, throwing her family into what she describes as “really severe financial unrest.” But Cocea had lifelong dreams of becoming a lawyer, and she knew that if she wanted to make those dreams a reality, she would have to fund the necessary (and pricey) academic degrees herself.

While she was in high school, Cocea started four different TikTok accounts, each of which emphasized slightly different elements of her personality, which she tailored over the next few years to learn what could be most appealing to her target demographic — men aged 18 to 24 working in tech, who she says “tend to have liquidity, which means money to spend on me.”

When she turned 18 in March of her senior year, she had perfected her online schoolgirl persona, which she named “hotblockchain,” and was able to start monetizing her platform. During that first year, Cocea earned roughly $250,000 by posting photos and videos to her public accounts, selling access to exclusive messages and regularly livestreaming from her dorm room. In the years since, that annual income has climbed into the millions.

For her bachelor’s degree, Cocea attended the highly selective Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she admits she initially turned heads when her peers discovered the source of her income.

“The first couple months of school, I would get clowned a little bit,” she admits to PEOPLE.

When she enrolled at CMU, she had a mere 27,000 followers on Instagram; by the time she graduated, that number was well over a million. And the larger her following became, the more curious her classmates became.

“My social media was picking up a lot,” she says. “After the first two months of undergrad, the only questions I ever got moving forward were, ‘Can we use your follower base to do research?’ ”

“All my research groups would have great sample sizes,” adds Cocea, laughing. “My peers started to know that this was a job to make money, and they inherently respected that.”

The creator graduated from CMU in May, and this fall, she began her first year at Michigan, where she says she’s become a bit of an “enigma” on campus for her profession.

But, maintains Cocea, “Everyone here is really respectful and fantastic. I haven't had any negative experiences.”

Occasionally, she’ll receive a question asking how she’s planning to “work in big law” considering her NSFW digital footprint, to which the aspiring public defender in her responds, “sister, that is not the goal,” she says.

“And I have a couple people who come up to me throughout the day and are like, ‘Hey, I have this great idea for a TikTok trend,’ ” adds Cocea. “It’s just the cutest thing ever, honestly.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49389687)

*Kurt Russell sigh*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49389713)

I can’t believe this pear shaped plain faced law shrew has this level of demand

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49390001)

lol actually a decent comment from a yahoo poster

onlyfans is gross and should be illegal and those students should be expelled

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49389982)

It's the Sophie Rain model where you don't even make porn you just tease endlessly and if you're in the 99.99 percentile phenotype Indian men will hand over their whole salary for a whiff.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49390022)

She clearly does it because she likes the attention and makes maybe 1-2k a month doing it but tells everyone she makes millions because that somehow makes it ok.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49391144)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791898&forum_id=2#49391319)