Welcome to a ‘real world’ turned upside down. NC college grads are scared, but excited.
College graduates in any year face an uncertain future.
But for the Class of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has completely disrupted “the real world” they expected to enter.
More than one in every five people working in North Carolina have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment in the past six weeks. Internships and job postings have vanished. Some graduating seniors adjusted plans for graduate school and others have been forced to move back home with their parents.
They are disappointed and scared. But they’re also excited and hopeful.
They won’t be sitting in a stadium dressed in their caps and gowns waiting to walk across the stage this May. Despite changes to graduation day, it still marks the beginning of a new chapter.
And this year, neither college graduates nor anyone else knows what’s to come.
‘Terrified of what the future holds’
Amy Waldron, a 22-year-old senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, has been looking for a job since the first day of spring break on March 12. She spends every day scrolling through LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
Waldron was a psychology major and wants to work as a recruiter or in a human resources department. She said those plans have been ruined because “nowhere is hiring” due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s hard to network, people aren’t answering emails and companies aren’t responding to job applications —she said she’s probably submitted around 150.
“I was pretty psyched to graduate because it looked like I was going to go into a great job market,” Waldron said. “I had options and mentors lined up, and it all kind of went up in smoke.”
It’s been difficult to face this reality at a university where everyone tells you you’re going to have great job prospects lined up, said Waldron. She’s scared about paying off her student loans because she’s graduating with almost $30,000 of debt.
“I’m staring that down with little to no hope of a job that’s going to put any kind of meaningful dent in it,” Waldron said.
She hasn’t had to move back in with parents in Charlotte yet, but she has anxiety about covering basic living expenses without working full-time. She said it sounds stupid, but she was actually excited to have a 9 to 5 job and pay taxes.
“Now, I’m terrified of what the future holds,” Waldron said.
‘I might just be a temporary fix’
Alex Rojas, 21, was planning to go to Florida for spring break with friends, but the COVID-19 crisis canceled that. Instead, the N.C. State University senior and Goodnight Scholar took an internship at Biomedomics assembling rapid test kits for COVID-19.
Rojas, who studied microbiology and biomanufacturing, spent his first day folding boxes and filling them with testing materials. By day two he decided to create a job for himself at the company.
Now, he’s planning the manufacturing process, training new hires that he recruited, managing a team of interns and working directly with senior leadership.
“I don’t think i would’ve ever been able to get an experience such as this if it weren’t for the randomness and craziness of coronavirus,” Rojas said.
Not only has this job given him the experience to manage a team in a work environment this early, but he’s also proud of the work he’s doing. More than 13,000 coronavirus cases have been reported in North Carolina and more than 500 people have died as of May 7.
“Each one of the tests is a person that it’s going out to,” Rojas said. “Tens of thousands [of people] are going to be able to be tested because of our work.”
He’s grateful to have a job and that his bosses allowed him to take on this responsibility. However, he said his rise to this role might’ve been out of necessity.
“I have no idea how long this one is going to last,” Rojas said. “I might just be a temporary fix.”
Still, it’s a bright spot in a sad and unexpected finish to his last semester as an undergraduate, he said. Rojas will still be an N.C. State student in the fall, hopefully on campus, to finish his master’s degree.
‘I’m excited to go to … a big city’
Jordan Cobb, 23, has spent the last few weeks taking senior photos of students who are sad to leave East Carolina University. Her photography business has been a blessing since she was furloughed from her part-time job at the Vidant Wellness Center in Greenville.
She’s had more sessions than usual as ECU’s spring commencement ceremony will now be virtual and seniors won’t be able to capture those graduation day memories on campus.
“Everyone is now wanting pictures because that’s kind of all they get,” said Cobb, a fifth-year senior. “We don’t really get to have a graduation walk, and we have our cap and gown for basically nothing.”
But as she’s making these portraits of students in the home they found at ECU, she can’t help but be excited about finally venturing out of Greenville. Her parent’s house where she grew up is about 10 minutes down the road from campus.
Cobb has plans to move to Philadelphia to pursue a master’s of public health at Drexel University. But now, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to move.
She chose the program at Drexel over New York University with the hope that she’ll be able to have in-person classes and avoid the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak. She said she wants to find an apartment in the city and is looking forward to new people and a new lifestyle up north. And she really doesn’t want to go back to living with her parents.
But taking that step is all contingent on when Drexel makes the decision about reopening campus to students and faculty. Hundreds of other colleges and universities across the nation don’t yet know how they’ll deliver classes in the fall because of the coronavirus.
“If everything were to go online, that would really mess up my plan,” Cobb said. “I’ve been here my whole life. I’m excited to go to … not only a new place, but a big city.”
She’s holding out hope that it’ll still happen.
‘A waiting game for all of us’
More students might consider taking a gap year as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to push college courses online this fall. For 22-year-old Oreyane Tate, a gap year after graduating as a Carolina Covenant Scholar from UNC-Chapel Hill was always the plan.
He wants to get more volunteer hours, study for the MCAT exam and get more experience in health care before applying to medical school.
Tate planned to do that through a fellowship at UNC or one that would place him in a health care clinic in a rural community in North Carolina. But those plans have been put on hold as the programs are in limbo.
“I don’t even know if they’re still going to happen,” Tate said. “It’s a waiting game for all of us.”
By this time many students are preparing to move out of the house, start full-time jobs or have been admitted into professional programs. But that all changed when businesses were forced to close and the stock market plunged as the coronavirus spread this spring. New unemployment claims have skyrocketed past what North Carolina saw during the recession that began in 2008.
At the height of the 2008 recession, North Carolina had about 100,000 new unemployment claims a month, the News & Observer previously reported. The state has had 10 times that many in the less than two months since mid-March.
“Even though we’re walking into not the best economy, this could be a great opportunity,” said Tate, who’s moved back home to Winterville, North Carolina. He said seniors have been forced to pause and re-evaluate their next steps.
“Our society is so fast paced, so we try to adhere to these strict timelines and what we think we want,” Tate said. “This pandemic has offered us a unique opportunity to reflect and think ‘is this something I really want to do?’”
‘A lot of goodbyes that are being missed’
Melia Kendall, 22, was supposed to be the first person in her family to walk across the stage and receive her diploma from N.C. State University. Her mom would be in the crowd and her family full of Wolfpack fans would’ve driven from Asheville to celebrate the big day.
But that’s not happening. And Kendall doesn’t know when or if it will. N.C. State has not set a new date for a commencement ceremonies for this graduating class.
“It’s not meaning that I didn’t get my degree and work four years for it,” Kendall said. “But it’s disappointing not to be able to have a celebratory event for my friends and family.”
Kendall said she would’ve been sitting in PNC Arena thinking about closure and being proud of her accomplishments, not worried about what’s going to change.
She’d be reminiscing on everything it took to get to graduation as a first generation college student and Ronald E. McNair Scholar, as well as the professors who helped her along the way.
“There’s a lot of goodbyes that are being missed, with people I might not ever see again,” Kendall said. “It’s a sad time and it’s new to everyone, but there’s a lot going on and that makes it understandable.”
Kendall said she’s worried about navigating an entirely new environment in graduate school and preparing for the health crisis to get worse.
“I plan to go no matter what the situation is or at least attend virtually,” Kendall said. “It’s just a lot of uncertainty about that, and that’s a different kind of stressful.”
‘I look forward to a new challenge’
As student body president at ECU, Colin Johnson, 22, has led the student body through a number of changes and challenges. His senior year was marked by the controversial resignation of interim chancellor Dan Gerlach, trustees meddling in student elections and a global pandemic that forced students off campus.
His final challenge is to deliver a virtual commencement speech.
“I was a bit more nervous to deliver a speech with a recording than doing it in front of thousands of people,” Johnson said. “There’s something more intimidating about it.”
He met a professional film crew at Wright Auditorium on campus and spoke into a camera instead of a crowd. Johnson also turned his tassel with the vice chancellor of student affairs for the video as if it were happening live. The speech will be aired during ECU’s online commencement ceremony Friday.
“All those things you get to do your senior year that feel like a celebration or culmination,” Johnson said. “That hasn’t really happened.”
The feeling of being a college graduate feels a bit more distant than he imagined. He said he’ll be in a “state of anxious anticipation” as he waits to see whether he’ll have a job this summer.
“I’m still excited about my future,” Johnson said. “It may be different than what I imagined, but I look forward to a new challenge.”
‘We’re all having to manage this step by step’
To say that Well Witoonchart’s final semester at Duke University didn’t go as planned would be a massive understatement.
The 21-year-old senior was excited about the Southeast Asian cultural events like dance showcases and a food festival she’d helped organize this spring. She was eager to start working in the environmental science field in the U.S.
And she couldn’t wait to see her parents at graduation to show them that their investment in sending her abroad for an education had paid off.
Instead, COVID-19 and lost job prospects forced her to go back home to Thailand and she ended up quarantined in a hotel in Bangkok for two weeks.
It wasn’t an ideal situation, but she’s safe and grateful for the people who helped her get home despite the travel bans.
She won’t attend a commencement ceremony and she doesn’t have a job in the U.S. as planned, but Witoonchart finds comfort in the fact that she and her classmates are not alone in this.
“We’re all having to manage this step by step and no one knows what they’re doing,” Witoonchart said. “People are very understanding ... and it’s a kind of empathy that you almost don’t get if the world wasn’t in chaos.
Everyone is in transition and facing uncertainty right now, she said, and there’s solidarity in that.
This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 4:28 PM.
