New Grads: Advice from the Last Lost Generation
With the release of new employment numbers, we at FrumForum decided that it was time to listen to the voices of the young as they face the challenges of this economic crisis. Over the last week, in an exclusive series, we have been featuring their first-person stories in this space.
In the final installment of our young and jobless series, two survivors from the last "lost generation" provide some advice to today's recent graduates.
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Gretchen Moran Laskas, "Never Stop Trying"
Little by little, we started to find work. My husband's unpaid internship turned into a paying one, albeit minimum wage with no benefits. An informational interview he'd done in 1994 became a job in 1995. (With benefits!) Some went back to school, and some, with their foot in the door, started moving up the D.C./corporate ladder. I started my first novel. We'd been told that we would make less than our parents had. We'd been told our earnings would be forever destroyed. Here we were -- in our late 20's with no 401Ks, renting (but perhaps without a roommate!) and massive credit card debt and student loans.
Where are we today? We are all very well employed in careers of our design. Maybe not the careers we thought we wanted when we were 25, but positions of respect and challenges. We are now the ones writing the job descriptions that say "experience required" and occasionally, in a misguided moment, sign and talk about "young people today." But we managed, and so will the millennial generation. There are only two options -- keep trying or quit, and quitting looks a lot like failure. ...
Telly Davidson, "Believe in Your Worth"
And in our socially-networked world, you have your most important survival weapon. You have each other. I don't mean this in a cheap, wannabe "motivational speaker" sense of phony promises and empty rainbows. I mean it in that the young authors and journalists I've seen who are (and will) succeeding in the post-bookstore, post-print society are the ones who have given up on "looking for Mr. Goodbar," on finding a "Big Daddy" to take care of them, as uncomfortable and disillusioning as that is.
Like their hero Mark Zuckerberg, they are taking the initiative to learn the brand-new rules and angles themselves, on their own, and then network and compare notes with each other. They don't wait for opportunities to present themselves; they go out and pound the pavement each day to try to make them, preparing for and taking the beatings that come along the way. They hope to improve their situations, but they don't allow themselves the false comfort of a future security blanket, where everything will work out as if on auto-pilot or cruise control. And they are a part of you.
Will it be pleasant? No way. Will getting your foot in the door be an easy task? Ha! Will it be the way our parents or grandparents had it? Not a chance. But it can be done. Believe in the worth of your life and work no matter how much others may insult or denigrate it, and above all, just keep going. ...
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