Welcome to the Striving to Thriving Youth Quote Library. Here you’ll find a curated collection of more than 5,700 quotes from young people ages 15-22 living in communities across the United States. In the library you can see how young people describe their multifaceted identities, how they understand and apply meaning to language around job, work and career, how they think about and assign value to relationships, networking and connections, and their future goals and the education and career choices they believe will lead them there. You can also view additional notes on curation, categories and filters.
“Social media, traveling…When you travel you meet different people. You can network like that, or social media you meet different people. Like watch videos, someone doing that and you also do the same thing. You can contact them.”
“Yes, they say a degree could really have changed their life…they said a college degree could have made a difference in their life. Especially where a job is a concern in this economy. Sometimes it’s hard for them to keep a job because it’s a temp job trying to find a long-term job.”
“Especially in the police world, you think of a police officer being a guy and you see a lot of times when women are cops they are not respected as much because nowadays people have a tendency to think that a female cop can’t do the same things that a male cop can when really they can. Honestly, my personal experience is knowing a few; they actually can kick butt better than the guys.”
“While studying for my master’s degree, I completed a practicum (working in the university’s counselor training center). I then completed a clinical therapy internship for a year with the city I lived in. I also had a semester long school counseling internship with a high school counseling program.”
“[Career] Entrepreneur.”
“[Career] Salary, security, family, long term.”
“I don’t want to work a traditional 9-5 for the rest of my life. I’d like to be able to retire at 50 years old like my parents did.”
“I faced a lot of challenges going through my pathway. What if I wasn’t ready for that position in my pathway?? I also had many of training opportunities though.”
“Knowing when to talk to people and who to talk to, I guess. Knowing if you can actually back up what you say you have, I guess. If you’re gonna talk to someone about getting a position with somebody knowing if you have the intellectual capital to – It’s back to that, I guess…Like knowing that it’s nice to have social capital, but it’s also nice to have other things to supplement that, I guess. Like you can’t just rely on knowing people. And you have to have skills of your own, so I get that.”
“I only got two things down. I said serve and protect, like not police-wise, but like as a like, you know, like not as police-wise, but as in like, but for like the gender. I said serve and protect, because like as males, like I felt like we was put on this earth to like serve and protect as in like, for example, like because we was like husbands to our wives and like stuff like that, and like we was supposed to be like in the household to serve and protect. So like as you like go to work, come home, like the breadwinner, so like, and then I only…like when I said protect, like protect our households as men. And so for the race, I put strong, because like I feel like, you know, like I’m just keeping real. Like us Black, us being, us like us being Black, like we all just, I mean, I feel like we strong, like we the strong. Like out of every other thing, like we are strong. Like every, I don’t know, like everything we do, we’re strong, so that’s how I look at it. That’s the only thing is two things I got.”