Huffington Magazine Issue 71 | Page 53

LOST GENERATION Jackson had taken her time to decide where to go to college, contemplating what sort of program would make best use of her skills. In high school, she had sometimes made costumes for her friends — usually Japanese anime characters. So her mother suggested she look into art school. The Art Institute in Seattle is part of a chain of 50 for-profit institutions across the nation. Looking back now, Jackson and her mother are both struck by how the admissions interview for the school felt more like a marketing a pitch. She was basically let in on the spot, they recall. “It was ‘OK, here’s the student loan package. We need to hurry up and get you enrolled,’” Rupe-Jackson says. “For my daughter, it was, ‘Oh yay, I want to go to school, and I can start right away.’ But it just didn’t seem right to me when I thought about it afterward.” When Jackson showed up at her graduation gala, she got the first sense that things were less than advertised. The gala had been billed as an industry event where she would present her portfolio to dozens of potential employers. “No one from the fashion industry showed up to our show,” HUFFINGTON 10.20.13 she recalls. “I didn’t hand out any résumés.” Over the following months, the career services office sent sporadic job listings her way, but many were for unpaid internships. Others were listings she could have found by herself online, she says. Desperate for income, she worked shifts at Macy’s during the 2010 holiday season, but was laid off after the rush. She applied to other department stores, hoping that more retail experience would put her on a path for fashion-design gigs. But many of those employers sought more retail experience. After being out of work for almost a year, she landed another temporary retail job at a See’s Candies store in the Portland area for the 2011 holiday season. When that job ended, she got in touch with a temp agency that needed seamstresses to repair and sew labels on lab coats. Hired on, she hoped she was finally on her way to something stable. But late last year she was laid off again — after she trained a new batch of temp workers to do her old job. By then, she had moved into her own apartment. “I was frantic to get a new job,” she says. “I had bills to pay.” So she took whatever she could get. She took the job at the super-