Eva Fortes is finally making a living from – wait for it – a job she loves. This was unheard of when she and her Columbia classmates graduated in 2009. Her barometer for the economy, she says, is how many of her circle of friends are, like her, doing what they want to do for a living.
All her friends are into social justice, Fortes jokes, so they knew at the outset they weren’t going to be making the big bucks. What they didn’t know was that they would be graduating at the height of the recession.
“When I first graduated, no one had a job except for me and one friend,” she says. “I had this constant feeling of guilt that I was employed while my friends were not.”
With bills to pay, many friends found themselves settling for part-time and temp work, or, if they were lucky, full-time with no benefits. “We’ve had to temper our expectations,” she says. “Instead of, ‘okay, let’s get the dream job, at the dream salary, at the dream company,’ now it’s ‘okay, let’s do something in the general area of what we want to be doing.’”
Fortes was fortunate to find a job she liked at a human rights organization in DC. Yet despite the benefits, she chafed at being away from New York. Halfway through 2011, she quit her job and moved back, to work as a freelance editor. An internship at a small publishing house led to a job offer, but the joy was short-lived: three weeks later, after the company reviewed their budget, she was laid off. Fortes, a Comparative Literature major, had to take on a temp job at Victoria’s Secret Catalog.
Her thick skin and willingness to compromise have finally paid off: Fortes began her current job in January, as an editor for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. And overall, she says, things are finally starting to turning around for her group. More and more people she knows are starting to find work in line with their passions.
“Every little step of the way we’re starting to get more.”
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