By Brendan, 21, Terre Haute, Indiana
Hello, my name is Brendan and I am a 21-year-old college student from southern Illinois studying in the aviation field, which I think gives me a unique position regarding the near future. I went from feeling confident about my future job prospects and ready to graduate on time to not being so sure about where I could end up due to how heavily the aviation industry is being negatively impacted. Currently however I no longer have a job, I have online classes that are never as much work as their physical counterpart, and I am not able to see anyone other than my roommate and girlfriend so this has left me spending the days finishing one episodic TV show or logging on for some game time. Saying these are hard times is an understatement, I have little to no confidence that the government can do its job and I have already mentally prepared for months and maybe years more of hearing about COVID-19. Some other countries have proved that their proactive measures have already been more successful than waiting until the last minute like the US has done.
Economic repercussions will be felt for years which will almost definitely result in a recession that me and my generation will have to try and make successful careers out of this. I am especially worried about students my age who are just about to graduate. Now these students have to fight another uphill battle just to get hired, as if it were not already hard enough. For me specifically I have had serious doubts in my career field choice like whether or not there will be jobs in this industry for the near future. Pilots and manufacturers salaries have already been cut and many jobs have been lost and this is even after the government’s bailouts.
I think overall the world will see some serious social changes after this as well as governmental changes. Social programs like healthcare and welfare are really being strained, this is causing many people to draw their attention to the flaws and realize how important these programs are and how they could be improved. I think the Coronavirus outbreak will really change the issues that countries around the world are focused on. The aftermath of all this will reveal who reacted the best and which measures in place to help with the outbreak worked the best, also these countries who were more successful will have more influence on a world scale which could shift who the main powers of the world are. The best word to describe the situation we have is uncertain, all of the sudden our future has become blurry. I believe this is all happening for a reason and I would like to see a lot of political and societal changes come from everything broken that this outbreak has revealed to us.