If Employment Game Has Changed, Who’s Teaching the Rules? : NPR
She’s had internships at NASA, the National Institutes of Health and at two universities. But she’s been looking for a job since November. Despite job fairs and what seemed to be a few good interviews, she hasn’t found work. The plan has changed, and now Mantilla intends to go straight back to school.
She says she doesn’t think she had enough information to set realistic expectations when she first went to college.
“It was a little bit hard for me, when I was in high school, to get the guidance because I was a first-generation college student, so I didn’t really have all the information,” she says. “On top of that, there was the language barrier — I was still learning English.”
If she could go back, she says she would have done more research and maybe even held off on going to college to save up money. Her former high school classmates who don’t have four-year degrees have moved up, working as medical assistants or retail managers.
“It’s sad to see that a lot of people who I went to high school with, who didn’t go to college, are doing much better than I am,” Mantilla says.
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