While having a chronic illness creates additional levels of stress for employees and responsibilities for employers, it also creates unique opportunities to connect with coworkers and customers. Explore this story of resilience as New Ways to Work spotlights Oliver Peyser-Thomas—a high school senior in Columbus, GA who battles Type 1 Diabetes while working his very…

Being a student agripreneur means learning to juggle lecture halls with planting beds. In 2024, I found myself waking at dawn to tend nutrient solutions and checking textbooks by moonlight. I still picture the day I stood in a sudden downpour, water cascading over me while I adjusted drip lines wet, shivering, but determined. That moment…

How JobCorps helped me transition from dead-end jobs to a career path. I have a money-making mindset. I’m great at problem-solving, and I excel in organization. Although I learned these positive traits via so much work experience in my teenage years, I struggled with time and money management as well as keeping a job. When…

Defining Value The kindness and respect shown to me at my current job has made me understand that it is not the glittery associations or false promises but rather the place and people that make a job valuable. I began my first job at age 19 as an intern for a creative space non-profit, working in the…

Lessons, Resilience & Character My success is not determined by where I am today, but by how far I have come on the journey. Real success isn’t about avoiding failure, it’s about persevering even when things don’t go as planned. There is no single event that leads to success; it is the product of lessons…

How Flexible Work Options Create Success For Younger Workers When I was under 18 I thought work had to be a 9-5 activity that you are either okay with at best, or that you deeply despised at worst. This caused my first job to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that made me depressed about the future.…

Interacting With Adults Is A Skillset Much of what I know about interacting with “adults”, or older professionals who seem to have so much more experience and knowledge than I do, was learned firsthand. In sharing these lessons I hope that they will help other young people make friends with adults, increasing achievement and success. About Me…

A Career Is A Journey For one to embark on a journey you must plant your feet down and look firmly toward the destination. The destination for me was to have a fully fledged career advocating for issues that mattered to my community, creating a movement for justice and equity as well as leaving a…

Foster Care Did Not Provide Me A Sense of Security At the age of fourteen, I was placed into foster care, and at fifteen, I realized I’d spend the rest of my childhood in foster care due to my mother’s incarceration. It’s a broken system regardless of CPS’s mission to save children. I struggled to…

No Stranger To Hard Work, Yet Entering The Workforce Is Scary Whenever you first begin to dive into the workforce it can be a scary thing, it is a whole new environment where you must rely on yourself to get things done and be the kind of worker managers want. Whether it was a good…

School Did Not Make Me Feel Prepared To Find A Job After 12 years of school, no one prepares you for entering the workforce and what you can expect. Upon graduating high school, I began to think about the costs of going off to college and what that would look like for my family, so…