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The Class of 2020 Looks for Work
Months after graduating into one of the most challenging job markets in generations, many are still searching for that first gig. Few openings emerge in retail or marketing; there are bright spots in tech.
By Ellen Byron / Wall Street Journal
Nov. 27, 2020
To find reliable cellphone service for his job interviews, 24-year-old Jule Brown often sits in his Hyundai Santa Fe next to the athletic fields at his old high school in Lower Merion Township, Pa.
Mr. Brown, who graduated from New York University in May, was all set for a career in sports marketing. A forward and guard on the NYU basketball team, he completed three marketing internships and earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. But after the pandemic forced much of the sports world to cancel or scale back operations, Mr. Brown saw his job prospects vanish. “Agencies, brands, pretty much everyone is on a hiring freeze right now,” he says.
He’s been living at home with his mother and grandmother, babysitting and doing a series of odd jobs while he looks for a full-time job. Interviewing for jobs in his car outside his old high school, where he was a basketball star, helps him remember his past athletic success and focus on his future aspirations. “That’s my place of solace,” says Mr. Brown. “It’s my good luck.”
The Class of 2020 was primed to enter one of the most robust job markets in history: In the fall of 2019, the U.S. unemployment rate was at a 50-year low of 3.5%.
Instead, they face one of the most challenging job markets for young people in decades. This spring, when many were graduating from college, unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds was above 20%, according to the Labor Department, compared with the low teens for all age groups. About 25% of employers said they closed their open positions or rescinded offers made in the spring to graduating students because of Covid-19, according to a September survey of 2,408 employers conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. “The hammer came down very suddenly,” says Philip Gardner, director of the institute and author of the study.
Price of Youth
Workers in their early 20s have suffereddouble-digit unemployment rates for sevenmonths straight amid the
The delay in a series of life milestones, from landing an entry-level job to moving away from home and achieving financial independence, is likely to have profound effects on this generation for years to come. A record number of young people are living at home with their parents and saddled with huge student-loan debt. Compounding all this is the social isolation and emotional strain that the pandemic has caused for most Americans. Some are postponing their job searches by going to graduate school, while others are making adjustments to align their career choices with their values—and some are seeking any job at all.
Coding in the family basement
Not since the Great Depression have so many young adults lived with their parents. In July, 52% of young adults ages 18 to 29 years old resided with one or both of their parents, surpassing the previous peak in 1940, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Accelerating a decadeslong trend, the number and share of young adults living with their parents grew sharply from February to July across all major racial and ethnic groups, men and women, metropolitan and rural residents and in all four main U.S. census regions, Pew says.
De Andre King, 22, spent the summer interviewing for computer-programming jobs from his family’s basement in Queens, N.Y. Since graduating from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., last spring, he has been living at home with his parents; two older brothers, who also work from home; and a younger sister who started her first college semester online, also at home.
Mr. King estimates he has applied for about 200 positions related to his computer-science degree, spending an average 40 hours a week interviewing, networking and learning new computer skills. For online job interviews, Mr. King would wear an ironed, button-down shirt and tie and angle the camera so the water meter on the wall behind him wouldn’t show.
In October, he was thrilled and relieved to land a job as a software engineer at Bloomberg LP in Princeton, N.J. The company’s offices aren’t open for now, so Mr. King is still living and working from home. Just before the job began, his 26-year-old brother agreed to swap his workspace in the bedroom they shared for the basement. Mr. King was happy to make the switch, craving a change of scenery after the months spent working downstairs. A new pair of headphones, and closing the bedroom door, also help drown out his family, he says. “We’re going on eight months of this,” Mr. King says. “It’s definitely a mixed bag.”
Home Again
To unwind, Mr. King has started running a few miles around his neighborhood every day and going for long drives outside the city. He dreams of his company’s office reopening and accruing some savings. “I’m definitely thinking about getting my own place,” he says.
High-fashion ambitions
Employment prospects for the Class of 2020 vary greatly depending on the job sector graduates are in. Insurance, scientific research and information technology are hiring and young people in those sectors are finding work. Small to midsize computer-services companies said they expect to hire 70% more new graduates this academic year over the year earlier period, according to the Michigan State study, and scientific-research companies said that hiring will be up 20% over the same period.
Meanwhile, those seeking jobs in retail, travel and the leisure and hospitality industries are having a much tougher time. The Michigan State study found that advertising, marketing and public-relations companies say hiring will be down 15% this year.
Last fall, Riley Jenson of Williston, Vt., was sure she was on her way to a good job in fashion. After spending a semester in Florence studying marketing and international business, Ms. Jenson, 22, convinced a dean at her school, Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., to let her spend the first semester of her senior year in Manhattan so she could intern at a public-relations agency working with fashion clients. She got permission to complete her senior thesis and other coursework remotely and won a short-term lease for a room at the Webster Apartments, the historic, women-only Midtown Manhattan residence famous for inexpensive rent.
She finished her internship confident that she had enough solid work experience to be able to return to New York with a full-time job soon after graduation. “What got me through school was I’d think: ‘I know what I want to do, I have a career I want to pursue, I have a plan,’” Ms. Jenson says.
But as marketing budgets dried up this spring and summer, so did job opportunities Ms. Jenson had envisioned, including at the agency where she interned a year ago.
Instead, Ms. Jenson now lives with her parents in Williston and works as an assistant manager at the local Carter’s, a chain of children’s clothing stores. The job helps her afford her college-loan payments and her car, a 2009 Hyundai Elantra, which she worries won’t survive the winter. “I try not to eat out or get takeout a lot because I’m trying to be financially smart,” she says.
Every day Ms. Jenson scours job sites for entry-level openings in marketing, communications or public relations. She has made it to final interview rounds about five times, but still hasn’t landed a position. “I will move to wherever I can get a good job,” she says. “I have a lot to give and I’m ready to move on.”
Moving on from Wall Street
One increasingly popular option for members of the Class of 2020 who can afford it: putting off the job search by staying in school. Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, says many of the approximately 500 colleges and universities who are members of her Washington, D.C.-based organization reported “healthy” increases in enrollment as early as this past summer. Education, business and health-science disciplines have been particularly popular master’s programs, she says.
Jerry Weinberg, dean of the graduate school at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Ill., says total applications for graduate programs at the university rose 17% this summer compared with last year. “We saw a little bit of a surge during the bank failures in 2008 but not as significant as we’re seeing right now,” Dr. Weinberg says.
He says the pandemic, social activism among young people and the recent presidential election have all influenced enrollment in public administration, social work and criminal justice programs. “The national conversation moves awareness of these areas in very significant ways,” he says.
David Taylor, a finance major at New York University, was actively networking and applying for investment banking jobs last fall, aiming to land a job on Wall Street.
But by spring, Covid-19 closed his campus and he finished his degree online from home in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Unexpectedly back home in his childhood bedroom, Mr. Taylor, 21, says he fell into “dark times,” unable to pull his laptop out from under his bed.
“Before this, I was rocking full speed—my classes were going well,” says Mr. Taylor. “I was living out my senior spring semester and then two weeks later I had all these online classes and my laptop stayed closed—I felt like, ‘I can’t do any of this.’”
Mr. Taylor had applied on a whim to master’s programs in education last fall, inspired by his work-study job as a tutor and basketball coach at a New York City high school. He thought he would pursue the degree in a few years to complement his banking experience, he says. The same week that NYU’s campus closed, he was accepted into the master’s program at Harvard University.
Long walks with his mother and conversations with his younger brother, then a high-school senior, made him realize how much he valued the relationships with students, parents and staff that he had formed at the New York high school. Mr. Taylor decided to accept the offer to get his master’s degree rather than continue pursuing finance jobs.
“I realized that all that finance-career stuff is awesome when you’re in school and in the city, but at home I was thinking about everything I was really passionate about and what really mattered to me,” Mr. Taylor says. “If I’m going to study education, this seems like the right time to do it.”
In August, Mr. Taylor started the first semester of his master’s program from his bedroom. He takes online classes on a laptop that is balanced on a stack of plastic storage bins he fished from under his bed, one of which holds his family’s Candy Land and Scrabble board games. “It’s not the most refined or beautiful, but it’s proving to be functional,” says Mr. Taylor.
Olympic dreams
As a Division 1 college swimmer, Chloe Isleta is accustomed to hard work, a packed schedule and plenty of pressure. Swimming competitively since age 6, Ms. Isleta embraced the structured life of practices, meets and schoolwork growing up in San Jose, Calif. During her final semester at Arizona State University in Tempe, Covid-19 abruptly shut down her college, swim team, gyms and pools.
Ms. Isleta went to bed.
“I would work out so consistently, every day, so when I stopped my body started to ache,” says Ms. Isleta, 22. “That was a dark phase I went through, I didn’t know what to do or who I was anymore and I didn’t know what the future held.”
Ms. Isleta had planned to swim competitively through the summer in the U.S. in hopes of qualifying for the Olympic team of the Philippines, where she also holds citizenship. But the pandemic canceled the qualifying meets she needed and then the 2020 Olympic Games were canceled, too.
“My whole life I have always had a plan,” says Ms. Isleta. “I had to learn that you can’t just be fixated on a schedule any more.”
Ms. Isleta’s slump lasted for several weeks last spring, she says. While finishing her degree online she and her two roommates, who were also friends and swimming teammates, gradually started watching movies together and eating junk food that is usually verboten to elite athletes, like pizza, cookies and ice cream. Ms. Isleta also started exercising at home, including yoga and other core work, to feel better.
For weeks after she graduated, Ms. Isleta couldn’t land any job interviews because Covid-19 concerns canceled openings or because recruiters told her they didn’t view her swimming career as a job qualification, she says. Through an ASU alum, Ms. Isleta landed an internship at a marketing agency. “They wanted someone who is committed, willing to learn, able to work with people and do the job right—that’s what being an athlete is.”
What’s your best advice for a recent college graduate looking for a job today? Join the conversation below.
By September, Ms. Isleta’s internship was nearing an end and she was again scrambling to find a job and a plan. She tapped the people she met during her internship, scoured local job postings for weeks and recently started as a sales assistant at a television station in Phoenix.
Ms. Isleta also started swimming with several former ASU teammates every day, sometimes twice, beginning at 5 a.m. and evening sessions sometimes ending around 10 p.m. “I’m busy again. I’m training again,” she says. “It’s better.”
She hopes her race times—and the end of the pandemic—will permit her a trip to the Olympics in 2021. She then wants to move to the Philippines in the fall to begin a master’s in marketing communications and swim with a local team.
Seeking stability
The specter of her $120,000 in student debt loomed large over Bridget Curley, 22, this summer as she looked for a full-time job after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute online last spring.
Since her freshman year, Ms. Curley has been concerned about how she would pay back the loans and vowed to pursue a course of study that would offer reliable job opportunities. With a chemistry major, she set her sights on the food and beverage industries after working in cafeterias since she was teenager.
When RPI’s campus, near Albany, N.Y., closed down in March, Ms. Curley moved into an apartment with her boyfriend in Enfield, Conn., and finished her classes online, living off savings that she had previously designated for travel to celebrate her graduation. In May, Ms. Curley started an internship as a quality-assurance technician for HP Hood at the dairy company’s lab in Agawam, Mass. Even though she’s worked in the lab for about seven months, she still doesn’t know her colleagues’ faces. “Everyone is wearing a face mask so you can’t recognize anybody,” she says. “The only people I’ve seen a little are in my department, and that’s only because we taste-test things.”
Knowing her student loans would start requiring payments in December, Ms. Curley felt urgency all summer to find a more permanent, full-time position, she says. As she applied for open jobs at Hood and at other companies, she doubled her efforts during her internship’s shifts. “I knew if I kept showing I was capable and a good asset to the lab as a whole, something good could come out of it,” says Ms. Curley.
In September, Ms. Curley landed a full-time quality-assurance position at Hood, testing raw milk and finished dairy products. The stress and uncertainty of this year solidified her commitment to saving money for emergencies and developing a career in an essential line of work like quality control at a food or beverage plant, she says. “I’m big on job security, that’s a big factor for me in life now,” says Ms. Curley.
Working from a new home
This summer, Cameron King moved from his family’s home in Brooklyn, N.Y., to his own apartment in Seattle to start a new job as a product manager with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud-computing team. Though the company is based in nearby Redmond, Wash., Mr. King, 22, hasn’t been to the office since his interview in a recruitment building last year. Instead, he is learning his new role and getting to know his manager and co-workers from his dining room table. “Half of it is my desk and the other half is my eating area,” he says.
Moving across the country just to work remotely from an apartment in Seattle allowed Mr. King to get settled without having to waste vacation time, he says. It also gave his family some breathing room. When Mr. King left home to attend Duke University in Durham, N.C., his aunt and her 6-year-old daughter moved in with his mother. Despite the difficulty of saying goodbye to his mother, setting up a remote workspace in her two-bedroom apartment would have been too difficult, Mr. King says. “I’d have to take over the living room,” he says.
Videoconferencing has some advantages, he says, particularly in meeting new people at work. He checks co-workers’ online calendars to find their available time slots and then sends a meeting invitation along with a note explaining what he would like to discuss.
“It’s weird because you’re asking through technology first, but I feel like now it’s easier than it would be in person because they know from the beginning why I want to meet,” says Mr. King. “Having meetings really structures my day. I start scheduling them on Sunday to have an idea of what my week will look like.”
Months after graduating into one of the most challenging job markets in generations, many are still searching for that first gig. Few openings emerge in retail or marketing; there are bright spots in tech.
By Ellen Byron / Wall Street Journal
Nov. 27, 2020
To find reliable cellphone service for his job interviews, 24-year-old Jule Brown often sits in his Hyundai Santa Fe next to the athletic fields at his old high school in Lower Merion Township, Pa.
Mr. Brown, who graduated from New York University in May, was all set for a career in sports marketing. A forward and guard on the NYU basketball team, he completed three marketing internships and earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. But after the pandemic forced much of the sports world to cancel or scale back operations, Mr. Brown saw his job prospects vanish. “Agencies, brands, pretty much everyone is on a hiring freeze right now,” he says.
He’s been living at home with his mother and grandmother, babysitting and doing a series of odd jobs while he looks for a full-time job. Interviewing for jobs in his car outside his old high school, where he was a basketball star, helps him remember his past athletic success and focus on his future aspirations. “That’s my place of solace,” says Mr. Brown. “It’s my good luck.”
The Class of 2020 was primed to enter one of the most robust job markets in history: In the fall of 2019, the U.S. unemployment rate was at a 50-year low of 3.5%.
Instead, they face one of the most challenging job markets for young people in decades. This spring, when many were graduating from college, unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds was above 20%, according to the Labor Department, compared with the low teens for all age groups. About 25% of employers said they closed their open positions or rescinded offers made in the spring to graduating students because of Covid-19, according to a September survey of 2,408 employers conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. “The hammer came down very suddenly,” says Philip Gardner, director of the institute and author of the study.
Price of Youth
Workers in their early 20s have suffereddouble-digit unemployment rates for sevenmonths straight amid the
The delay in a series of life milestones, from landing an entry-level job to moving away from home and achieving financial independence, is likely to have profound effects on this generation for years to come. A record number of young people are living at home with their parents and saddled with huge student-loan debt. Compounding all this is the social isolation and emotional strain that the pandemic has caused for most Americans. Some are postponing their job searches by going to graduate school, while others are making adjustments to align their career choices with their values—and some are seeking any job at all.
Coding in the family basement
Not since the Great Depression have so many young adults lived with their parents. In July, 52% of young adults ages 18 to 29 years old resided with one or both of their parents, surpassing the previous peak in 1940, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Accelerating a decadeslong trend, the number and share of young adults living with their parents grew sharply from February to July across all major racial and ethnic groups, men and women, metropolitan and rural residents and in all four main U.S. census regions, Pew says.
De Andre King, 22, spent the summer interviewing for computer-programming jobs from his family’s basement in Queens, N.Y. Since graduating from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., last spring, he has been living at home with his parents; two older brothers, who also work from home; and a younger sister who started her first college semester online, also at home.
Mr. King estimates he has applied for about 200 positions related to his computer-science degree, spending an average 40 hours a week interviewing, networking and learning new computer skills. For online job interviews, Mr. King would wear an ironed, button-down shirt and tie and angle the camera so the water meter on the wall behind him wouldn’t show.
In October, he was thrilled and relieved to land a job as a software engineer at Bloomberg LP in Princeton, N.J. The company’s offices aren’t open for now, so Mr. King is still living and working from home. Just before the job began, his 26-year-old brother agreed to swap his workspace in the bedroom they shared for the basement. Mr. King was happy to make the switch, craving a change of scenery after the months spent working downstairs. A new pair of headphones, and closing the bedroom door, also help drown out his family, he says. “We’re going on eight months of this,” Mr. King says. “It’s definitely a mixed bag.”
Home Again
To unwind, Mr. King has started running a few miles around his neighborhood every day and going for long drives outside the city. He dreams of his company’s office reopening and accruing some savings. “I’m definitely thinking about getting my own place,” he says.
High-fashion ambitions
Employment prospects for the Class of 2020 vary greatly depending on the job sector graduates are in. Insurance, scientific research and information technology are hiring and young people in those sectors are finding work. Small to midsize computer-services companies said they expect to hire 70% more new graduates this academic year over the year earlier period, according to the Michigan State study, and scientific-research companies said that hiring will be up 20% over the same period.
Meanwhile, those seeking jobs in retail, travel and the leisure and hospitality industries are having a much tougher time. The Michigan State study found that advertising, marketing and public-relations companies say hiring will be down 15% this year.
Last fall, Riley Jenson of Williston, Vt., was sure she was on her way to a good job in fashion. After spending a semester in Florence studying marketing and international business, Ms. Jenson, 22, convinced a dean at her school, Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., to let her spend the first semester of her senior year in Manhattan so she could intern at a public-relations agency working with fashion clients. She got permission to complete her senior thesis and other coursework remotely and won a short-term lease for a room at the Webster Apartments, the historic, women-only Midtown Manhattan residence famous for inexpensive rent.
She finished her internship confident that she had enough solid work experience to be able to return to New York with a full-time job soon after graduation. “What got me through school was I’d think: ‘I know what I want to do, I have a career I want to pursue, I have a plan,’” Ms. Jenson says.
But as marketing budgets dried up this spring and summer, so did job opportunities Ms. Jenson had envisioned, including at the agency where she interned a year ago.
Instead, Ms. Jenson now lives with her parents in Williston and works as an assistant manager at the local Carter’s, a chain of children’s clothing stores. The job helps her afford her college-loan payments and her car, a 2009 Hyundai Elantra, which she worries won’t survive the winter. “I try not to eat out or get takeout a lot because I’m trying to be financially smart,” she says.
Every day Ms. Jenson scours job sites for entry-level openings in marketing, communications or public relations. She has made it to final interview rounds about five times, but still hasn’t landed a position. “I will move to wherever I can get a good job,” she says. “I have a lot to give and I’m ready to move on.”
Moving on from Wall Street
One increasingly popular option for members of the Class of 2020 who can afford it: putting off the job search by staying in school. Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, says many of the approximately 500 colleges and universities who are members of her Washington, D.C.-based organization reported “healthy” increases in enrollment as early as this past summer. Education, business and health-science disciplines have been particularly popular master’s programs, she says.
Jerry Weinberg, dean of the graduate school at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Ill., says total applications for graduate programs at the university rose 17% this summer compared with last year. “We saw a little bit of a surge during the bank failures in 2008 but not as significant as we’re seeing right now,” Dr. Weinberg says.
He says the pandemic, social activism among young people and the recent presidential election have all influenced enrollment in public administration, social work and criminal justice programs. “The national conversation moves awareness of these areas in very significant ways,” he says.
David Taylor, a finance major at New York University, was actively networking and applying for investment banking jobs last fall, aiming to land a job on Wall Street.
But by spring, Covid-19 closed his campus and he finished his degree online from home in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Unexpectedly back home in his childhood bedroom, Mr. Taylor, 21, says he fell into “dark times,” unable to pull his laptop out from under his bed.
“Before this, I was rocking full speed—my classes were going well,” says Mr. Taylor. “I was living out my senior spring semester and then two weeks later I had all these online classes and my laptop stayed closed—I felt like, ‘I can’t do any of this.’”
Mr. Taylor had applied on a whim to master’s programs in education last fall, inspired by his work-study job as a tutor and basketball coach at a New York City high school. He thought he would pursue the degree in a few years to complement his banking experience, he says. The same week that NYU’s campus closed, he was accepted into the master’s program at Harvard University.
Long walks with his mother and conversations with his younger brother, then a high-school senior, made him realize how much he valued the relationships with students, parents and staff that he had formed at the New York high school. Mr. Taylor decided to accept the offer to get his master’s degree rather than continue pursuing finance jobs.
“I realized that all that finance-career stuff is awesome when you’re in school and in the city, but at home I was thinking about everything I was really passionate about and what really mattered to me,” Mr. Taylor says. “If I’m going to study education, this seems like the right time to do it.”
In August, Mr. Taylor started the first semester of his master’s program from his bedroom. He takes online classes on a laptop that is balanced on a stack of plastic storage bins he fished from under his bed, one of which holds his family’s Candy Land and Scrabble board games. “It’s not the most refined or beautiful, but it’s proving to be functional,” says Mr. Taylor.
Olympic dreams
As a Division 1 college swimmer, Chloe Isleta is accustomed to hard work, a packed schedule and plenty of pressure. Swimming competitively since age 6, Ms. Isleta embraced the structured life of practices, meets and schoolwork growing up in San Jose, Calif. During her final semester at Arizona State University in Tempe, Covid-19 abruptly shut down her college, swim team, gyms and pools.
Ms. Isleta went to bed.
“I would work out so consistently, every day, so when I stopped my body started to ache,” says Ms. Isleta, 22. “That was a dark phase I went through, I didn’t know what to do or who I was anymore and I didn’t know what the future held.”
Ms. Isleta had planned to swim competitively through the summer in the U.S. in hopes of qualifying for the Olympic team of the Philippines, where she also holds citizenship. But the pandemic canceled the qualifying meets she needed and then the 2020 Olympic Games were canceled, too.
“My whole life I have always had a plan,” says Ms. Isleta. “I had to learn that you can’t just be fixated on a schedule any more.”
Ms. Isleta’s slump lasted for several weeks last spring, she says. While finishing her degree online she and her two roommates, who were also friends and swimming teammates, gradually started watching movies together and eating junk food that is usually verboten to elite athletes, like pizza, cookies and ice cream. Ms. Isleta also started exercising at home, including yoga and other core work, to feel better.
For weeks after she graduated, Ms. Isleta couldn’t land any job interviews because Covid-19 concerns canceled openings or because recruiters told her they didn’t view her swimming career as a job qualification, she says. Through an ASU alum, Ms. Isleta landed an internship at a marketing agency. “They wanted someone who is committed, willing to learn, able to work with people and do the job right—that’s what being an athlete is.”
What’s your best advice for a recent college graduate looking for a job today? Join the conversation below.
By September, Ms. Isleta’s internship was nearing an end and she was again scrambling to find a job and a plan. She tapped the people she met during her internship, scoured local job postings for weeks and recently started as a sales assistant at a television station in Phoenix.
Ms. Isleta also started swimming with several former ASU teammates every day, sometimes twice, beginning at 5 a.m. and evening sessions sometimes ending around 10 p.m. “I’m busy again. I’m training again,” she says. “It’s better.”
She hopes her race times—and the end of the pandemic—will permit her a trip to the Olympics in 2021. She then wants to move to the Philippines in the fall to begin a master’s in marketing communications and swim with a local team.
Seeking stability
The specter of her $120,000 in student debt loomed large over Bridget Curley, 22, this summer as she looked for a full-time job after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute online last spring.
Since her freshman year, Ms. Curley has been concerned about how she would pay back the loans and vowed to pursue a course of study that would offer reliable job opportunities. With a chemistry major, she set her sights on the food and beverage industries after working in cafeterias since she was teenager.
When RPI’s campus, near Albany, N.Y., closed down in March, Ms. Curley moved into an apartment with her boyfriend in Enfield, Conn., and finished her classes online, living off savings that she had previously designated for travel to celebrate her graduation. In May, Ms. Curley started an internship as a quality-assurance technician for HP Hood at the dairy company’s lab in Agawam, Mass. Even though she’s worked in the lab for about seven months, she still doesn’t know her colleagues’ faces. “Everyone is wearing a face mask so you can’t recognize anybody,” she says. “The only people I’ve seen a little are in my department, and that’s only because we taste-test things.”
Knowing her student loans would start requiring payments in December, Ms. Curley felt urgency all summer to find a more permanent, full-time position, she says. As she applied for open jobs at Hood and at other companies, she doubled her efforts during her internship’s shifts. “I knew if I kept showing I was capable and a good asset to the lab as a whole, something good could come out of it,” says Ms. Curley.
In September, Ms. Curley landed a full-time quality-assurance position at Hood, testing raw milk and finished dairy products. The stress and uncertainty of this year solidified her commitment to saving money for emergencies and developing a career in an essential line of work like quality control at a food or beverage plant, she says. “I’m big on job security, that’s a big factor for me in life now,” says Ms. Curley.
Working from a new home
This summer, Cameron King moved from his family’s home in Brooklyn, N.Y., to his own apartment in Seattle to start a new job as a product manager with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud-computing team. Though the company is based in nearby Redmond, Wash., Mr. King, 22, hasn’t been to the office since his interview in a recruitment building last year. Instead, he is learning his new role and getting to know his manager and co-workers from his dining room table. “Half of it is my desk and the other half is my eating area,” he says.
Moving across the country just to work remotely from an apartment in Seattle allowed Mr. King to get settled without having to waste vacation time, he says. It also gave his family some breathing room. When Mr. King left home to attend Duke University in Durham, N.C., his aunt and her 6-year-old daughter moved in with his mother. Despite the difficulty of saying goodbye to his mother, setting up a remote workspace in her two-bedroom apartment would have been too difficult, Mr. King says. “I’d have to take over the living room,” he says.
Videoconferencing has some advantages, he says, particularly in meeting new people at work. He checks co-workers’ online calendars to find their available time slots and then sends a meeting invitation along with a note explaining what he would like to discuss.
“It’s weird because you’re asking through technology first, but I feel like now it’s easier than it would be in person because they know from the beginning why I want to meet,” says Mr. King. “Having meetings really structures my day. I start scheduling them on Sunday to have an idea of what my week will look like.”
