Generation C Has Nowhere to Turn – By Amanda Mull (The Atlantic) / April 13 2020
Recent history suggests young people could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
When Ananay Arora looks off his balcony, he doesn’t 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 University’s campus, where Arora is currently a sophomore majoring in computer science. It’s usually full of life, but like most colleges across the country, ASU canceled in-person classes in mid-March. “Everyone’s gone home. Nothing is going on,” he told me. “It’s 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. That’s why he stayed in his off-campus apartment instead of heading back to live with his parents in India. “If my internship happens and there’s a travel ban, I wouldn’t be able to get back,” he said. It’s 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 don’t 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 Arora—who seem much less likely to have severe complications with COVID-19 than their elderly counterparts—living 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. It’s 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 fool’s errand even when the world isn’t 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?
Continue to article: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/how-coronavirus-will-change-young-peoples-lives/609862/
