COVID-19 is another mountain for millennials to climb

ALI ZAFAR

Graduating into a free-falling economy is scary, especially for those of us carrying insurmountable student debt. That’s the nightmare I find myself in.

It’s been a challenging two years getting through the rigours of the MBA program at the Schulich School of Business. The light at the end of the tunnel was graduating with those illustrious three-letter words; a proverbial passport to enter the lucrative corporate world.

But with a recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, that tunnel just got longer.

This isn’t the first recession I’ve experienced in adulthood. I graduated with a journalism degree in 2008, just as the global economy began to tank, in part due to a U.S. financial system that was fraught with vulnerabilities.

It was a time when the decline of the North American newspaper industry sped up amid widespread digital disruption. In 2015, I was hired by the Toronto Star. By 2016, I was laid off. With slim pickings in journalism, I attempted to reinvent myself through the MBA.

I recognize that the bull and bear markets are in a never-ending tango, but I didn’t expect to graduate in a raging bear market a second time around. These are turbulent days for everyone, but especially for one demographic.

Millennials are those of us born in the early 1980s to mid-1990s. Economic uncertainty has left an indelible mark on our lives. We’re priced out of the Toronto housing market. The idea of having kids seems like a pricey pipe dream. Precarious gig work is our norm.

Millennials are often labelled entitled or lazy. I’d argue we’re disillusioned, and rightly so. Even with my best attempts to navigate the deluge of disruptions, I’ve landed in a recession with $61,000 in student debt.

It’s all very bleak, until I look at my peers in the MBA program. These are some of the brightest people I’ve come across. And they’re driven, defying the typical millennial stereotype.

Take Tony Chen. He holds a degree in music from the University of Toronto. Prior to enrolling in the MBA program, Chen worked as a self-employed music instructor, while also performing various paid gigs with his band. He now plans to pivot into finance.

Or take Sheen Dhunjisha. She holds a graduate degree in interior architecture from UCLA. I haven’t met anyone with such a strong passion for sustainable design management.

The uncertainty paving our lives has one silver lining. It forces us to reinvent ourselves, whether that entails a shift from music to finance, or architecture to sustainability — or, in my case, journalism to marketing.

My strategy professor would refer to what we’re going through as a black swan, which is defined as an event so disruptive that it changes the course of society.

I would call it another year in the life of a millennial. Mohammad Ali Zafar is an MBA candidate at the Schulich School of Business, York University.