1) - a 240 character description of the story. (For use in TubeMogel)
Lindsay Pankok graduated in May 2011 with a master’s degree in social work, but like many young adults, she has yet to find a full-time job. Listen to her talk about post-grad life and what it’s like to be young and educated during the Great Recession.
2) - a longer 250 word description of the story. Details like name, age, addresses are important here.
By now, we all know the story: kid goes to college, kid gets a degree, kid gets frustrated because jobs in this economy are hard to come by.
Young adults have complained about their employment prospects in the Times, New York magazine, NPR and several other news outlets. We’ve heard them worry about paying off their student loans, about moving back in with their parents and of taking jobs they wouldn’t have considered even a year ago.
At 24 years old, with a newly-minted master’s degree from New York University and a social work license, Lindsay Pankok should fit in with that group, groaning that her life’s been put on hold because of the economy.
She could complain about the uselessness of her graduate degree in her restaurant hostessing job. Or how financial woes forced her to move back into her Brooklyn apartment, and to share what was once her own room with a friend, because she can’t afford it otherwise.
But ask her how she feels about putting her career on hold and scraping by and she’ll just shrug.
“That’s just the way it is right now,” she’ll say cheerfully.
Pankok’s outlook is what sets her apart from many young, educated adults in today’s economy. While she’ll concede that things are less than ideal, she chooses instead to look on the bright side. Watch the video about to meet Pankok and to see why she’s not depressed about the economy and what she’s learned from her recent employment struggle.
3) - a compelling headline and subhead that are SEO optimized plus at least 5 tags
"Finding Her Identity, Degree in Hand: Lessons learned during the Great Recession."
4) - a word for word accurate transcript of the final piece
I was raised being told "Stay in school, work hard in school and that's how you'll be successful." So I did that, and I stayed in school for a long time [laughs] and I worked really hard, and I did really well in school.
And so, I was told that all of those things would promise me this future that now is not the case.
[Text on screen: Lindsay Pankok graduated in May from New York University, where she earned her Masters in Social Work degree.
Like millions of other recent grads, Lindsay has been unable to find a full-time job, let alone one in her field of study.
To make ends meet, she's a hostess at a restaurant.]
When I first graduated, I was just so happy to be done with graduate school. I was like, "I don't have to write papers any more, like, this is awesome." I graduated on my birthday and it was the best, ya know? And I was really excited.
In August was when I started to get worried. And there was a time when I was really frantic like, "I don't know how to pay rent." I had to borrow some money from family to pay my rent and that time was really tough and that's when I decided "Okay, let's back away and do the practical thing of applying for whatever job I can get just to pay rent."
I'm glad I got the restaurant job when I did because that was sort of the right time to pick me back up.
There are those moments where I just cry, and yell, and listen to angry music [laughs] and I'm like "This is not fair," because it's not fair. But that's what it is.
A lot of people think I must be devastated and desperate not to have this job in my field but I'm really not. I have this job that I really enjoy, I'm having a few volunteer gigs that I'm having a lot of fun with, and gaining fun experiences and meeting new people. I have great friends. Like, I'm happy.
I think that when you're in college -- or at least when I was in college -- I thought that my identity would be very much defined by my field. You know, my major, and then my eventual job and that would be what forms my identity.
That's the biggest thing I've learned. That, "What do you do? I'm a restaurant hostess." That's not my full identity. Yea, that's where my paycheck comes from but I'm all of these other things that I may not be getting a paycheck from but they're more important to me.
5) - at least three suitable links to the subject, story or theme from other sources
"Educated and Jobless: What's Next for Millenials?" npr.org/2011/11/12/142274437/educated-and-jobless-whats-next-for-millenials?ps=rs
The Project on Student Debt: projectonstudentdebt.org/
Brazen Life (career blog aimed at Generation Y) blog.brazencareerist.com/
6) - a short behind-the-scenes story about how you found the character, something interesting that happened that’s not in the final piece, why you created this story, etc (great for blogging)
The difficulty young, college-educated adults have in finding a full-time job in today’s economy is the last thing I want to think about right now, much less report on.
I too, am graduating, and in a few days, I’ll join their ranks once again and become yet another degree-holding, unemployed statistic. It’s an exciting and terrifying time.
My own impending doom -- I mean, graduation -- is part of what drew me to Lindsay’s story. She’s gone through a lot of the things I faced in my first foray into the “real world” (when I got my bachelor’s degree in 2009). But unlike me, she hasn’t been scarred by experience. Despite her difficulties and the expectations of her friends and family, she’s still managed to look on the bright side and enjoy life after school.
Lindsay’s a pretty effervescent person in general, so it was easy to dismiss her bright outlook, but then she wrote this awesome and personal blog post. Like me – and millions of other kids our age – she too faced rejection, felt like she wasn’t “good enough” and snapped at family members who wanted to know how the job search was going.
But instead of letting all that get her down, she thought about her life, rewrote her life goals, accepted that the economy wasn’t great and began to enjoy her life instead of wait for it happen.
So many news articles have focused on my generation’s frustration, despair and hopelessness, but as Lindsay shows, not all of us feel that way. Life after graduation isn’t what we expected it to be, but maybe if more of us knew more people like Lindsay, we could learn to accept things as they are and look on the bright side.