Your career choice is to work for cheap, neurotic rich people? 

Start with psychology classes.

Not enough info to advice you.

Anyways, I'm a residential architect - the type that does work for developers in NYC. The smallest project I've worked on (for more than 12 hours) in the past four years has probably been around 100,000 GSF.

When I'm running projects, it is extremely satisfying. Generally more so than early on in my career, when I was doing single family housing and small commercial spaces. Practices that do that are generally one-man shows that often can't break out of single family housing because they're run by people just don't know how to quickly adapt to (often bureaucratic and technological) changes or just aren't that smart. I pretty much got fired early on from one of those practices - This particular practice complained about running out of fees when they decided to reinvent the wheel while forsaking every opportunity for novel design. (For context, they thought Macs were going to be the next production workhorses in architecture because they were easy to use; I remember watching the whole office pool around an iMac and spend 10 minutes trying to find the power button. Meanwhile, they had me running Maxwell for interior viz on a 2004 computer with 512MB of RAM).

So what I'm trying to get at is: Your mileage may vary. Residential architecture is a pretty varied field. I love large-scale work, and  the occasional small scale project that crosses our desks; I love being part of a big team tackling a huge project with minimal busy-work because everyone is on top of their game, which is what I've found my current office to be - and though sometimes I long to design apartment renovations in the city, I simply I detest small office politics and would only go back to that once I strike out on my own.

Finally, the thing to keep in mind is that if you're going to do large scale residential work, you have to keep an agenda or you will get jaded. Mine is simply increasing the housing supply in the city. I think that's a net good regardless of where or what's your target market.

Those are my 2 cents.

I've never done residential work so take all this advice with a grain of salt:

• get licensed - its the only piece of paper short of a long list of projects that shows that you are somewhat competent
• Go to grad school in the area you want to live, unless you are accepted into one of the very top schools with scholarships. Alumni networks are important
• work for any firm that will hire you, once you have started your career you can be more picky about firms 2 and 3.  Also, big pay increases only happen when you switch firms, so don't stay anywhere too long, at least at first.

Competition is fierce at the bottom (residential).... Building Designers, interior designers, contractors, and any idiot with sketchup and cad are all competing for the same job - at least if you are licensed you have options.

get the best education you can afford

go live in a place you will be happy but is large enough to sustain people with much larger incomes than you

start to work for a low but livable hourly rate and provide only the best service you are able. be honest with yourself about your hours and get paid for them. meet & talk to people in the community. join clubs.

over 5 years, you should be able to get enough of a reputation that you can raise your rate slowly and turn down increasingly more mundane projects. don't do "bread & butter" unless that's truly your financial/eating situation

or

have mom & dad hire you for a second home and start with a portfolio building project 

(this all assumes you get licensed, so go do idp with a firm that matches your mentoring goals)

Finances

Find out how to control the GOLD.  Find out how to use other peoples money until you have enough of your own to design / build  thus becoming THE BIG DOG. 

Go work construction for a couple of years to actually learn something about architecture. Then figure out what you want to do.

the license is not necessary if you are doing houses.  perfectly legal in almost every state.  get real experiance like miles said. dont waste time collecting merit badges in some silly architecture internship.  i would also advise against grad school.  too spensive. use that money to buy a house and remodel it.   you will thank me in 10 years  

Don't let people tell you to wait either.

Architects have a penchant for pretending that time is experience. Zaha started her firm at 26, and so did Rem. Stanford White was 19.

I was lucky in that I never spent more than a few weeks doing bathroom details. I got picked up by a great principal+project manager team that essentially allowed me to become an extension of them and bite off as much as I could chew. I was projects 6 months out of school. That kickstarted the hell out of my career.

Get into a position where the rate of the work challenges you. Get good. Then, if you're smart, get out.

And realize that no one knows everything and almost everyone is just pretending.