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.
“Having a job that is super laid back, like a regional brand manager. I met with him [the brand manager], from Red Bull, a few times from San Diego. He is going all over on the road—just goes and hands out drinks to all his friends and watches people surf or skate. He is like drink a Red Bull, here. It is just super laid back. He gets paid crazy amounts of money for it.”
“What made me not want to be the manager anymore was when I think about my family and I think about the hours they work. I don’t like the hours because I would want to be with my family especially when they close super late. I know management is a lot…When I thought about my family, I thought teacher because when they start going to school, I work the hours that they are going to school and then I like the vacations I have…I have talked to people that are teachers; they don’t make a lot of money but they make a decent amount to get them by. That is okay with me just because I see that, for example, when they are on summer vacation they have time to go out with their family. They get that time off. I look at her life and it is like [talkover].”
“I’ve been thinking a little bit about what other ethnicities experiences in the workplace are.”
“Confident & Hispanic.”
“At 45 I expect to be living still in SoCal. By now I hope to have a stable career with my only job being my business. I plan to have big family so the most important things would be my kids husband and family. It feels kinda stressful to think about my future because I hope for the best but there’s so many things out of my control that will end up creating my future.”
“I felt relieved because I always had an idea of what my pathway is but I had never written it down and put it in words. Will my plan work?”
“My friends are the most supportive people I know. I like them so much. All we do is lift each other up and tell each other how good we are.”
“I definitely went into business because it was the most interesting, and also, I know that I can get a very good job just because we’re heavily recruited. Like young, Black professionals that actually want to go in these spaces that, you know, we haven’t been in for all of this time. It’s just like they’re, it’s like everybody is scrambling to make a pipeline to get all this diverse talent.”
“Positives about job: professional, being an adult. Positives about work: paychecks, coworkers.”
“They just felt that because of the debt it wasn’t a huge waste and they aren’t working in their field of study or they think they could have been successful still without it. [What do they wish they had done instead of going to college?] Entered the workforce with no debt or done some sort of internship for experience.”