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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGeneration C Has Nowhere to Turn
Recent history suggests young people could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/how-coronavirus-will-change-young-peoples-lives/609862/
When Ananay Arora looks off his balcony, he doesnt see much these days. From his high-rise apartment, which he shared with three roommates before one of them moved back to Taiwan a few weeks ago, he has a view of Arizona State Universitys campus, where Arora is currently a sophomore majoring in computer science. Its usually full of life, but like most colleges across the country, ASU canceled in-person classes in mid-March. Everyones gone home. Nothing is going on, he told me. Its kind of depressing.
Like a lot of young people waiting out the coronavirus pandemic, Arora is contemplating his future, which includes a prestigious internship at Apple meant to begin in May. Thats why he stayed in his off-campus apartment instead of heading back to live with his parents in India. If my internship happens and theres a travel ban, I wouldnt be able to get back, he said. Its not just a summer job: In the tech industry, being a good intern is by far the best way to get a coveted job offer after graduation. Getting an [internship] interview is hard, Arora explained. If my internship gets completely canceled, I dont know if any company is going to interview me again.
In the face of enormous uncertainty, Arora and his classmates Kaan Aksoy and Devyash Lodha created ismyinternshipcancelled.com, which lets students submit what they know about various companies plans and keep track of which ones are still planning to bring on new people, and if they are, whether those internships can be done remotely. Arora says that in the few days since he and his friends launched the site, which currently lists more than 300 companies, thousands of people have visited. For healthy young people like Arorawho seem much less likely to have severe complications with COVID-19 than their elderly counterpartsliving through a months-long quarantine and the deep economic recession likely to come after it will have consequences all its own, most of which, for the moment, are unknowable.
Its hard to imagine the future of this cohort in any detail, beyond the fact that their lives will be, in at least some ways, profoundly different from what they might have been. While writing about how the pandemic might eventually end, my colleague Ed Yong posited that babies born in the post-coronavirus era, who will never know life before whatever enduring changes lie ahead, might be called Generation C. But Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended. Predicting the future is a fools errand even when the world isnt weathering what looks to be an epoch-defining calamity, but in the disasters of the past lie clues that can begin to answer a question vital to the lives of millions of Americans: What will become of Generation C?
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Generation C Has Nowhere to Turn (Original Post)
Celerity
Apr 2020
OP
marble falls
(57,097 posts)1. Nothing new here.
progree
(10,908 posts)2. "deep economic recession likely to come" - Yup. I'm surprised how many DUers think the economy is
going to bounce right back to about where we were like as if we're going back to work after a 3- or 4-day holiday weekend.
brush
(53,784 posts)3. They'll eudure it just as everyone else has. There have been 13 (it figures) steep...
recessions since the end of WWll. GenZers and Millennials are not the first cohorts to go through rough times. This one will probably be particularly bad though as we have an idiot in the WH who has no idea of what he's doing.
We're tough though, but hold on to your seat belts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States