My 2021 grad was sent home in March 2020 and school was 100% remote her senior year so she never got to go back to campus. She also felt very cheated out of her last year and a quarter, of what she felt would have been the best part of her college experience. She was initially assured that her summer internship with a consulting company would not be cancelled, but they walked that back. They were too busy trying to figure out how to navigate Covid that they decided to cancel all the internships a month later. She ended up making the most of everything - took classes remotely from her room fall semester while interviewing on Zoom. She did include her internship on her resume at my suggestion, with a note that it was cancelled due to Covid and ended up with an offer from another consulting company. She then redirected her energy towards focusing on forging her post college life instead of what she was missing out on. She is now having a blast living and working in NYC - a surprisingly large number of her friends from college and HS ended up there so she has a great support group. Her company has alternated from being remote, to having the option to work in the office to going remote again during the Omicron surge - they are now back to mostly being in the office and having the opportunity to develop relationships with the other analysts in her cohort and the senior partners on their projects have been invaluable. She is happy and thriving but still feels a bit of sadness over her lost college experience. Her college had a delayed graduation ceremony for their 2021 grads in May so she was able to return and see a lot of her friends which really helped and allowed her some closure.
Son and GF both graduated before 2020, but they both went WFH during COVID, and for a long time they were both contractors on various projects. It can be hard to start in a new town/on new project(s) when you’re fully remote and not used to it. He had lots of friends nearby, but she didn’t. I think it was easier on him. I’ve also spoken to manager friends. Some of them have had a harder time dealing with fully remote than others. Financially they’ve both done fine to great.
My younger daughter graduated in 2019, studied for her nursing boards and worked just a few months before she was thrust into a pandemic. Working on a Covid ward was obviously very difficult but was the experience of a lifetime. In many ways her life was more “ normal” than her sister’s or that of friends who all of a sudden worked remotely and felt isolated. She went into work and got to interact with many people. She was grateful for that and that she got a normal college experience.
Great that it ultimately worked out. I feel so bad for her and many of her peers who WERE robbed of that experience. Many will say “boohoo, who cares about an experience, yada yada yada”. I’m sure there will be studies done that view many angles of this group 10 yrs out. How do they relate to others? How do they consider their company, career, industry? Circumstances for those who navigated to leadership vs. staying in a narrow lane and the leading factors?
I personally feel there will be many who realize a stunted career or who moved towards a path because another wasn’t realistically available due to lack of human contact. I could be totally off base, but humans typically want to be with humans. Living with HS and college friends vs. meeting / engaging/ expanding relationships / and hanging out with new peers is pretty crucial to evolving as a professional and a human. (just my opinion). This generation was dealt a really bad hand.
I was just chatting with my D about this topic. She graduated in 2019 and started a two year pre-grad school position in a new city. She wasn’t loving living alone there but was making friends at work and doing ok. She got engaged around Christmas and her fiancée was set to graduate in May 2020. When everything went remote in March 2020 she immediately came home and just let her apartment sit empty. Her fiancée had his senior year disrupted and had no proper graduation, like so many others. She went back and moved out of the apartment when the lease was up in June 2020 and got married in July (small outdoor wedding had been planned and went forward-seems less crazy now than it did then) and then moved to another city with her husband where he was starting grad school. This is where her job being remote all this time was really helpful. She would otherwise have left that job early and had to find another. She did say the other day that the job was really not fun anymore after everything went remote. Definitely not the same experience as it had been for the first several months in person, but it was still great experience for her in her field. The job stayed remote all the way through the end of the two years, and by then she had applied and had a couple of grad school acceptances. Started a PhD at the same school as her husband last fall. The hardest for them was making connections in the new city when everything was remote, including most of her husband’s coursework in his new program for that first year. They were very isolated but after four years of long distance (met in high school) they were pretty happy to at least have each other. Now they are both in school, most everything is in person, they bought a house, and they’ve done well at making new friends amongst their cohort in their programs.
I think in terms of career this has worked out ok for them both. It probably kept my daughter on track to pursue the PhD rather than possibly getting derailed by the marriage/move and a necessary job change a year out of school.
My 2018 grad moved to a new area just before COVID shut everything down. Work continued, partially remote and some in person. Like others have mentioned, making connections was the big challenge. By the time things opened again they had given up on the area. Damn COVID. A recent move to a new city is allowing a new start.
D was finishing a full time MBA program when Covid hit in March 2020. Thankfully she had a job lined up with the company she had interned with in the summer of 2019. She told me it was very tough for the class behind them to get internships. She was on WFH and changed jobs several months ago, still on WFH, very flexible, higher pay. This has actually worked in her favor as she is expecting her first child soon.
S was working in London in 2020. Office changed to WFH, flatmate moved back home with her family and London was very locked down. It was tough for him and very lonely. He had been thinking about grad school and it likely pushed him in that direction. He returned to the states in May 2021 and started his Masters program that fall. He is still pretty far from us, but I’m happy we are at least on the same side of the pond. Hopefully he will get a well paying job when he graduates next year. 