- Challenges and Barriers
- Lack of skills and competition
“College. Will I get enough money to get a full ride? Will my SAT scores be high enough to do that?”
Participant:
- Online
- white
- male
- 15-22
- lower income
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.
“College. Will I get enough money to get a full ride? Will my SAT scores be high enough to do that?”
“You get paid doing all of them. I think a career is something that is more long-term and you make better money.”
“Still working Missi Marine, moved up to lead man or foreman, watching football. Right now, I’m just, you know, I’m a welder. That’s all I do is weld. But when you move up to lead man, you just there to give assistance, you know. If something major comes in, you know, and one of the lower-class men don’t know anything, needs to be trained, or just any, need any help in any way, you’re, that’s what you’re there for. Foreman is, just like my papaw, we get there at 5:30 in the evening, and we come out. We huddle up. There’s about ten of us. He tells us what to do, and then we get started on our job. He goes back upstairs, and he come out every once in a while during the night until 4:00 in the morning and check on us, make sure we’re doing our job.”
“I started with my community service project that is going on for 3 years. Then I would hopefully go to college and grad school and study psychology and nutrition. Then I want to work at a hospital and intern there at UCLA, Santa Monica. Then I want to become a mentor because that really helped me, so I want to be able to do the same. Then through that program I would get a lot of connections to this research center at Columbia University. I want to eventually like kind of building up being a mentor, getting involved in the program. I want to work there in New York and get a lot more experience. After that or maybe while I am still working there, I want to publish a book about my experiences. Eventually I want to do a TED Talk and speeches at universities and fashion shows on a healthier environment for everyone’s body image and nutrition – kind of less of a diet culture focus overall thing.”
“Money problems; got scholarships and jobs to help pay for school.”
“The money.”
“Formality…It’s just like you have to present yourself in a way that you want other people to talk to you. So, it’s like the way you come off may seem like you don’t want to seem rude, but you want to seem engaged. And you know how to dress for certain events.”
“I would get to save animal lives.”
“At the end of the first day, I am excited but still a little uncertain exactly what the discussion will entail.”
[On “job”] “I put completing many tasks. Like a job, try to put it in my own words. Performance…Like depending on what your job requires you to do. You have to perform a certain way…Well, in my job, you have to maintain a certain discipline. So, you can’t like do certain things in a certain way. You have to maintain disability – not disability. You have to maintain a proper stature. Yeah, discipline”