Ricardo

“We all need to stop fighting each other. We need to realize that we're all the same, we're all little people and we have to band together and be strong.”

These powerful words are from Ricardo, a student in his early twenties. Ricardo spends his days working, attending college, and learning about the state of the world in his attempts to make it a better place.

Ricardo attended Watkins Mill High School. He displayed his leadership skills at an early age and was voted to captain of the varsity basketball team in his sophomore year. He continued to serve as captain, leading his team to victory for the remainder of his high school career.

When high school was over, Ricardo enrolled in an HV/AC program at a local college. He only stayed a year before he decided to join Americorp and spend a year of his life dedicated to serving the community.

“My grandma was so giving and she was always helping people,” he says. “I get it from her. I love helping people and seeing the smile on their face when they see good things happening in their lives.”

Americorp took Ricardo places he had never thought of going. He built houses for Habitat for Humanity in Oklahoma City, helped rebuild homes destroyed by hurricanes in McAllen, Texas, and tutored underprivileged children in Huston. But his most memorable experience was at Cal-Wood Education Center outside of Boulder, Colorado. Surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of the Rocky Mountains. Ricardo helped teach children about the environment, built and refurbished trails, and engaged in forest fire prevention. Ricardo was introduced to people who had completely different life experiences, and he learned to accept people for who they were without judgment. In Americorp he made friends who he still stays in close contact with, and enjoyed every moment of his experience.

“Americorp was one of the best times of my life,” he says. “There were some hard parts but I would do it all again, the good and the bad.”

Upon returning home, Ricardo took a job at a car dealership. Though he wanted to be a mechanic there were no apprentice positions open, so he instead worked at the car wash. Through his desire to take more of a leadership role Ricardo worked his way up the ladder to become the night manager at the dealership.

“With my money from that job I bought my very first car,” he says. “It was a green Hyundai Elantra that had headlights that wobbled when I hit a bump and had 100,000 miles on it but it lasted me a while and got me everywhere I needed to go.”

Ricardo moved on from that job, pursuing his passion for cars to work at a small detail and body work shop and decided to go back to school for HV/AC. He enrolled in the program at Montgomery College, close to his home in Maryland where he lives with his girlfriend of three years.


Today, Ricardo is halfway through his course of study and works as a porter for a Cadillac dealership. He is responsible for picking up and delivering cars all over the mid-Atlantic region, meeting new and interesting people every day.

In his free time, Ricardo satisfies his curiosity about the world by following the news and reading deeper into topics that particularly interest him. He is deeply concerned about the path that the world is going down and believes that things need to change.

“I feel like my generation has to work double-time to get things done,” he explains. “The world has changed so much in all these deep ways during our lifetime with things like 9/11, the wars, the first African American president. From what I see and what I've experienced, the generation coming after us doesn't have as much respect for themselves or the world around them. It's up to us to teach them and bring the world together.”

Ricardo believes change in policies has to start with voting. Young people have to get out and make good choices about who is going to be in charge of society. He says that recent attempts to block access to voting for some groups has to stop, and the millennial generation has to get out and vote if they want to start making changes. Ricardo wants people to be more aware of the world they live in and the responsibilities each person has to one another.

“So much needs to change and I feel like it's almost out of my hands because I'm only got two hands. It's going to take everybody. People need to open their eyes to whats going on around them and band together if the world is going to get better.”

Through his leadership skills developed in high school and his service in Americorp, Ricardo has already proven himself to be a capable young man with big plans for himself and for the world. It is without a doubt that he will continue to help those around him and contribute to the sense of community he hopes everyone will someday embrace.

Sara

Throughout high school, we are told that we have to get into a “good” college, that we have to get our grades up, participate in after school activities and make SURE that we get good marks on our SATs, all in the name of getting into a “quality” college. And in the last decade or so, that college can end up costing tens of thousands of dollars.

There is an answer, and it's always been there, providing diverse programs at a reasonable cost. It's called Community College, and for many, it is the answer to their prayers.

Sara had always been interested in food and nutrition. She became a vegan in high school, and had to learn what foods would provide the vitamins and minerals she needed without turning to animal products. But she was intimidated by the thought of going to college for nutrition. The programs seemed overwhelmingly science based, and Sara was afraid that her professors and peers would ridicule her veganism. So after her high school graduation in 2005, instead of pursuing her passion, she went to a local private college, Dowling, for communications.

“I absolutely should have taken a year off,” she admits. “But I felt so pressured to go to college and do something that I went.”

Communications seemed like a major with many different possibilities, but it was one that Sara had no real interest in. Following a year of poor grades, she transferred to Five Towns College for film. She met the same difficulties here that she had at Dowling.

“Film is such a hard industry to work in, and I wasn't interested in it enough to want to claw my way to the top,” she says.

Sara tried to make this new college work for a year, but the pressure to do well and the anxiety over money was often completely overwhelming. She left Five Towns after two semesters, finally deciding to pursue her passion: nutrition.

Sara dipped her toes into the field by attending a certification course for integrated nutrition. It seemed a less threatening option than another semester in school, but the quality simply wasn't there. The program didn't really teach her anything useful or based in science, and she realized that if she was serious about going into the field, she would have to go about it the right way.

Instead of attending another private school, Sara truly began her path to becoming a nutritionist at Suffolk Community College. At first it was just to ease the financial burden, but as the weeks went on, she found herself flourishing.

“My professors were great, and I felt so motivated!” she says. “I was happy with what I was learning, I was doing really well, and the other students around me were enthusiastic. I was afraid of this field for so long, but if I had just taken a year off after high school, I might have ended up here first and avoided all that anxiety.”

Not only was the nutrition program at Suffolk motivating, it was challenging. Sara interned at several different locations, including hospitals, schools, and long term care facilities. She earned a two year degree in applied sciences and she felt more than prepared to take her first career exam. Sara passed with flying colors, and became a Dietetic Technician.

Sara had done so well at Suffolk that she earned a full ride to the nutritionist program at C.W. Post.

“At C.W. Post I felt so much more prepared than the other students,” Sara says. “I think people really need to look closely at community colleges because they offer so much more than people think they do.”

She graduated from C.W. Post in May of 2014, but is staying with the school for another year to complete her internship program. Like Suffolk's program, the internship offers her a taste of nutritionist work from a multitude of vocations. She also began a part time job working at the Renfrew Center in New York City, a facility that helps women overcome eating disorders. The work was intense, but extraordinarily eye opening. Sara has become interested in community work, in teaching classes about nutrition.

“It's funny when I think about how shy I was in high school,” she says. “I used to be excused from oral presentations, and now teaching groups is one of my favorite aspects of what I do.”

Sara will be taking the test to become a full Dietician in the spring of 2015. She is incredibly grateful for the opportunity that Suffolk gave her to pursue her passion without fear or ridicule, and she hopes soon to pass on her love of nutrition to a new generation.

Vacation Week!

Hint: It's not really a vacation.

I'm very happy with how this project is going, and I'd like to make it even better. My editor and I are taking a week off from posting, but not a week off from work! We are interviewing, writing, and investigating new stories and art for our readers to enjoy. So do not fret, and we will see you bright and early on Monday with a brand new story!

Doug

Photo courtesy of Vianca Maldonado

Film is one of the most difficult industries to break into. The pay is often little to nothing at all, the hours are incredibly long, and jobs are frequently based on favoritism rather than skill.

Doug knows all of this and, after a few years of working corporate, he still wants to go freelance.

From an early age, Doug has had interested in film. He considered himself a “computer nerd” in high school and liked to work with digital video. In his junior year at Babylon High School, he took the opportunity to attend a video production course at a local BOCES campus. This course was a mixture of both film and TV production techniques and involved lots of hand-on work such as camera operation.

While taking this course he earned an internship at a local production company.

“I remember the first shoot they ever took me on,” he says. “It was stressful and there was money on the line and it was a long two days but it was so exciting! I knew from then on that film was what I wanted to do.”

Following the advice of his teachers, Doug attended NYIT Old Westbury after graduating high school in 2007. He admits that he should have done more research on the program, but Doug thought he was doing the right thing by saving money and staying local at a school that offered him a scholarship. It didn't take him long to see that he had made the wrong choice.

“I feel like in this industry, it's not so much the skills you have but the connections you make in school,” he explains. “At a commuter school like that, I barely made any friends in my department and I certainly didn't make any connections that would help me get production jobs. I felt like the other students weren't serious about their major and the teachers didn't really give us any motivation.”

Doug applied to the school of Visual Arts in New York City toward the end of his second year. Although he was accepted, the school offered him nothing financially, and so he was unable to attend. He finished out his bachelor's at NYIT, but felt that he hadn't really learned much from his college experience.

During his senior year, Doug worked as an editor at a wedding photography company. Although Doug didn't have much commercial experience, the owner took a chance on him. The company even worked around his college schedule for which Doug was incredibly grateful. He kept the job a year after his graduation, but he knew that New York City was where he was meant to be.

“Any better job would be in the city,” he says. “There's being a staff member on film productions, working freelance on whatever comes your way, or working at one of the broadcast companies. Whatever you do, it's all happening in the city.”

His chance came in the fall of 2012, when a Florida-based company hired Doug to work at their New York Office. This business was involved with streaming video all around the world. Doug's job was to to take the incoming video, convert it to web format and send it out to websites. He enjoyed his work for a time, as it took him back to his days as a teenager, playing around with digital-based video. However, after the other employees in the office were let go, Doug found his days incredibly lonely.

“They treated me very well, but I was working long hours totally alone and I still wasn't doing what I went to school for,” he says. “At this point, my goal became to get out and do what I wanted to do: work on productions in TV or film.”

Doug quit his job and went freelance. This is hard under normal circumstances, but because it had been so many years since college, Doug felt like he had to start over completely. He had very few connections and even less credits, but he was determined to follow his passion. Without his own equipment, jobs became extremely difficult to find.

“I feel like there's this ongoing debate in the film community right now,” he explains. “ A lot of people think they can buy their way into the industry with equipment and that convinces a lot of people that this is the norm and individuals should have all this expensive equipment. It raises expectations to an untenable level.”

Without a great deal of connections, Doug was forced to used websites as his main source of incoming jobs.

"I do have some equipment,” he says. “I've spent a few thousand on that equipment because of that very notion that people are expected to have something. I've tried to keep my expenses reasonable, and I wrestle with wanting avoid purchases because professionals shouldn't be buying most of their gear and buying stuff in the interest of acquiring gigs.”

He was able to working the production side for the video streaming company, and that gave him a foot in the door to the rest of the industry. He made enough money on these shoots to take more educational, albeit unpaid, work in hopes of climbing further up the ladder. At one of these shoots that he made a friend who connected him to one of his most important jobs yet.

“I got to work on an incredibly popular reality TV show,” he says. “This is a massive credit on my resume, because so many TV shows don't want you unless you already have TV experience.”

Doug has a few major future goals. He would love to be a camera operator and eventually a cinematographer, but he feels like he “hasn't even started because [he's] so far down the ladder.”

He also wants to start his own company that caters to commercial film interests. Recently, he has begun to approach several businesses in regard to their interest in online video advertising.

“If I can get this off the ground, I know it will be endless work,” he says with a laugh. “But it's something I would absolutely love to do.”

Finally, he wants to begin shooting personal projects, but he wants to go about it the right way.

“The industry doesn't have to be exploitative. If I do this, I'm going to pay my staff what they deserve. I'm not going to require them to have their own equipment, I'm going to feed them decent food and treat them like human beings. I'm finally getting my confidence back, getting the production itch, and it's incredibly exciting.”

Doug works part time streaming video for Major League Baseball, leaving his Saturdays completely free to work on productions. Although his path might not be the most conventional, he tackles the challenges he meets with spirit and resolution, ensuring his eventual success. 

Kristina

College is expensive.

No one is arguing this. College can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but students deal with the cost because colleges are supposed to be institutes of higher learning, training them to be experts in their chosen field.

“Colleges are businesses,” says Kristina.

Her opinion comes from more than four years in Stony Brook University and just over two semesters at Hunter college. Kristina graduated from Rocky Point High School in 2007 and entered college in the fall. Her chosen major was chemistry, but she switched to environmental after a year. Environmental science was not what she had imagined it would be.

“We once spent an hour an a half of class time discussing which type of orange juice was more environmentally friendly,” she says, laughing. “I took some random classes after that, and I finally found I liked anthropology.” She decided to become a forensic anthropologist, and has dedicated the rest of her educational career to achieving that end.

Kristina had to stay an extra semester to finish her degree, fighting her adviser’s lack of knowledge about he major the whole way.

Kristina took a semester off after attaining her bachelor's to apply to grad school and work as a bank teller. But her experience at Stony Brook had not been ideal, and she didn't get into any of the schools she applied to.

“They all wanted someone who had field experience,” she says. “Stony Brook only offered field experience for another $15,000. I had enough loans to pay off already.”

One grad school, Hunter College, made her an offer. If she took some classes as a non-matriculated student, they would let her become an official student the next time she reapplied. Though it was costly, Kristina accepted, and by the fall of 2013 she was officially pursing her masters in Anthropology. She moved with her boyfriend to the Bronx where he had a job and she could be closer to school.

In addition to being a part time student, Kristina works at Barnes & Nobel as a head cashier. The pay isn't minimum wage, but the high cost of living in the city means that she still struggles with finances.

“If my loans weren't on hold because of school I'd be losing about 2/3rds of my monthly salary trying to pay them off,” she says. “I have no idea what I'm going to do after graduation. I've tried to talk with the loan company on the phone but they're so frustrating.”

Kristina doubts that her experience at Stony Brook was worth any of her trouble and money.

“College was a waste of my time,” she says. “If my major wants field experience, why aren't there field schools? Why do I need my master's and a PhD? I have yet to take a single scientific statistics course or a class on interpreting data. The only thing I've learned in six years is how to do research.”

Post graduation, her future is uncertain. Some Hunter graduates work at the NYC medical examiner's office or the 9/11 Museum. There are internships available for these locations, but they are extremely competitive.

One thing is for sure, Kristina is excited to leave the Bronx and move to Queens next year, which she says is much more friendly toward people her age.

“The Bronx is very family oriented,” she says. “But in Queens there's more things to do and more people our age living there.”

Kristina may be uncertain about her future career, but she has shown great amounts of dedication to her field of study, fighting through less than ideal circumstances in her dogged pursuit of her degrees. Any internship or company would be lucky to have such a committed individual on their team.

Abby

There's been a bit of controversy over minimum wage lately.

Some say that raising the minimum wage would destroy small businesses. Others claim it isn't right that someone should work 40 hours a week and not earn enough to support a family.

Abby has been working for minimum wage or close to it for the last six years, and she can see both sides of the argument.

Abby graduated from West Islip High School in 2006. She moved to San Diego, California, the afternoon of her commencement ceremony. She lived in Pacific Beach with her sister and her sister's husband, and started working at a clothing store in neighborhood.

“I didn't have any plans for higher education when I got out there,” she says. “I just sort of kept doing things on a whim.”

Her whims eventually led her to school for massage therapy. She attended classes while still working, but her education hit a dead end when she struggled to find field experience.

Abby was making just enough at the clothing store to move out. She moved to another house in Pacific Beach that she shared with roommates, then went to live in a large, open floor studio apartment in downtown San Diego.

“I was really struggling with money,” Abby recollects. “I couldn't afford a car and I was still trying to pay off all those loans from school. I was just barely covering rent.”

She decided to move back in with her sister's family, who had relocated to a neighborhood on the outskirts of San Diego. For a time, her future seemed to be coming together. In 2009 Abby met her boyfriend, Adam. She took a job at Bed Bath & Beyond, which was close enough to the house that she could walk to work. But it was also at this time that she incurred serious debt, taking out a cash advance on a credit card to help pay rent.

“I can't believe I did that,” she says. “It's five years later and I'm still trying to pay that off.”

Unfortunately, in 2010, the landlord evicted the family in order to sell the house. Forced to move again, Abby could no longer work at Bed Bath & Beyond because she still had no car. She did odd jobs here and there for friends and family, but it was not enough.

Abby and Adam decided that perhaps they needed a change of scenery. They packed up and moved to Seattle in 2011. Abigail quickly found a job at a thrift store, and later with Forever 21. She finally had a plan for her education, and began to save up enough so that she could go back to college to become a physical therapy assistant.

But Seattle proved to be even more expensive than San Diego had been. Abby and Adam both worked full time, but with their expenses all income seemed to be out the door again before it ever touched their hands.

However, Abby was proud of one thing.

“I got my per-requisites done!” she says, happily. “It seemed a lot of money for a community college, but I got something done while I was up there!”

After more than a year of barely making ends meet,. Abby and Adam decided to move back to San Diego. Abby was able to transfer and keep her job with Forever 21, although now she works part time instead of full time. She is currently searching for another job and looking forward to starting school again in the wintertime.

“My life is like a constant struggle of little minimum wage jobs,” she comments. “I owe Adam so much, he takes such good care of me.”

Despite all of her experiences, Abby is still on the fence about any kind of drastic minimum wage increase.

“I know it would hurt a lot of small businesses, and I try to support local,” she says. “But at the same time, I know that lots of corporations could pay their employees so much more than they do. It's a tough call.”

Courtney

How does one define a family?

Is it the relatives we see every Christmas? Is it the friends that we chose to keep close to us? A combination of the two? Perhaps a family is simply the people who pick us up when life has beaten us down.

Courtney graduated from Massapequa High School in 2006 and entered SUNY Farmingdale that same year. She went to study graphic design, which at the time seemed to be a lucrative field. But problems cropped up even before she left college. Her school altered the requirements for her major halfway through her experience. Her adviser didn't understand the new program, resulting in Courtney taking unnecessary classes and graduating a year late.

She began applying to jobs immediately after graduation. However, she graduated after 2008, and no one was hiring. Courtney received only one phone interview after sending out countless resumes and then never heard from the company again.

“I just felt that everything was wasted,” she says, expressing a sentiment familiar to our generation. “All that money and five years of college right down the drain.”

Courtney was living with her mother and sister and dating Austin, who is now her fiance. Her dad had disowned his children and walked away from his family, leaving them with nothing.

And Hurricane Sandy was about to take what little they did have away.

“Sandy claimed my house, my car, and all my worldly possessions,” she laments. “So I was suddenly homeless in a blizzard.”


Rebuilding a life in New York was financially impossible for Courtney and Austin, so the pair moved down to Florida, where they live in a relative's condo. Austin works for a car rental company and Courtney is returning to school to study cosmetology, her generous mother paying her tuition.

“She's superwoman,” Courtney says. “She's always been two parents for me and she gives me more love than I could get from an eight person family. She's my best friend and even though she has so many people to take care of, she still takes care of me.”

Her mother's support reaches beyond sending her back to school. She also buys most of their groceries, as the majority of Austin's paycheck goes into paying student loans, gas, and insurance.

Courtney and Austin struggle with money every single day. Although they together with a reasonable rent, it comes at the cost of living one hour away from both Austin's job and Courtney's school. Before they managed to save up enough to have two cars, Courtney was driving four hours a day. Even now, they both wake up at 5:30am every morning to be at school and work on time. Austin's hours were recently slashed, and now the second car has become yet another financial burden.

“Even though we live together we barely see each other,” she says. “We see each other for about an hour before it's time to go to sleep and do the whole thing over again tomorrow.

Courtney still applies to jobs every day, and every rejection letter or wordless dismissal heaps on more stress and frustration.

But she refuses to let her hardships define her.

She has found renewed purpose as a cosmetologist. Her school is partnered with a program that helps recently released female convicts get their life back on track after their incarceration. She styles their hair and applies their makeup, all to prepare them for job interviews. Courtney takes great pride in this.

“I know that these women have it rougher than me,” she says. “But I feel like I help them and I'm so proud of my work.”

Courtney and Austin will be getting married on October 25^th. It will be a very small wedding: just the couple, her mother and her sister. As Courtney puts it, “it's all the people who matter.”

“We've been together through everything for five years,” she says of her relationship. “Of course we fight because money problems put stress on everything but you always have to remember who's important.”

Courtney sees this stage in her life as a particularly steep set of stepping stones to the next. She takes nothing for granted and is astounded daily by the amount of love and support she receives from her mother and fiance. She knows now that she is on the right track. Despite all the frustration she is eager for the next stage in her life to begin.

“On days when I don't think I can possibly make it, I remind myself that I have a 100% success rate of getting through bad days.”