Working Strategies: Next steps for ‘non-trad’ grads

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Amy Lindgren

Are you a non-traditional student in the process of graduating? “Non-trads” (in the parlance of academia) are usually older, having perhaps stopped out after high school to begin jobs or raise kids.

They may have started a college or technical program but left before completing. Or they may be returning for a second degree later in life.

If you’re a non-trad, you know it even if you didn’t know the term. As an older graduate, you have similar concerns as your younger cohort, but you also have unique issues that come from being farther along in your life journey.

One thing you might not have is a slew of well-meaning aunties and uncles offering you unsolicited advice. If so, allow me!

Two weeks ago, I provided guidance for traditional-age graduates. Now it’s your turn: If you’re a newly-graduated non-trad from a college or training program, I have some tips for you as well.

Each category begins with steps that are universal for all ages, with the addition of ideas for older graduates.

Putzy logistical stuff

Universal steps, for all students: Review your diploma for accuracy. Confirm which online resources can still be used at your alma mater, such as email. Ask about available career resources. Figure out your student loan repayment, if applicable. Check on health insurance, if you were covered at school.

Additional steps especially for non-traditional students:

• Connect with the school’s finance department. Were you being sponsored by your employer or perhaps a workforce development program for tuition? If so, it’s smart to verify that all records are clear at the school. Ideally, you’d receive a paid-in-full receipt.

• Confirm payment with your sponsor. Likewise, it’s important to verify with your employer or case manager that the training has been or will be paid by them. Another receipt or in-writing confirmation is the ideal.

• Look into graduation ceremonies. OK, maybe you don’t want to walk in a ceremony — are you sure? It won’t hurt to find out when they’re being held. In many cases, online and/or non-trad students are given multiple options, so you may still have opportunities to consider.

Career stuff

Universal steps, for all students: Update or create your LinkedIn profile. Update your résumé. Think about what you want to do next.

Additional steps especially for non-traditional students:

• If you’re working, tell your boss you’ve graduated. In some systems, the new certificate or degree will make you eligible for an automatic pay increase or a higher title. Even if that’s not the case, it’s appropriate to go over your goals with your supervisor, and to identify how you want to put your training to use.

• Join a professional association or trade group. You’ve just achieved a new level of skills and knowledge — now is the time when you could use guidance from others in your field. If your program was a general studies degree, choose a group that is also general, or one that matches interests you want to explore.

• Move on, if needed. If your boss doesn’t or can’t provide a higher level of work for you, or if you’re currently unemployed, it’s time to find a job that fits your new skill level. Do this relatively soon, while your knowledge and credibility are the freshest.

• Consider the next degree. Crazy? Maybe not — now that you know what a return to school feels like, you’re in good position to consider more training or degrees. It might be easier to do now, while you’re already in gear, so to speak.

Life stuff

Universal steps, for all students: Decide where to live, especially if you’ve been co-housing during school. Guard your mental health, since achieving goals sometimes leads to feeling let-down. Guard your finances, even if you do get a raise.

Additional steps especially for non-traditional students:

• Buy a cake! Or hold a brunch, or go out to dinner with friends. As an older student, you may think you’ve outgrown the garage party with the “Graduate 2024!” banner, but you can still celebrate. This is a big deal, my friend, and you deserve the accolades (even if you have to arrange them yourself).

And a final word: Don’t sweat the whole career thing, but — if you’re not feeling on track within a few months of completing your program, ask for help. Sometimes all it takes is new information or fresh ideas for things to line up.

Congratulations, graduate. You’re amazing!

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

Joe Soucheray: St. Thomas arena? It’s hard to pick a winner in this first-world problem

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Yard signs opposing a new 5,500-seat hockey/basketball arena at the University of St. Thomas are everywhere in the neighborhoods around the school, including a couple of signs far enough away to assume the occupants just don’t like hockey or basketball.

Where people are going to park is the principal concern of the opponents, who have twice asked the St. Paul City Council to forbid the development of the building. Between council rejections, opponents also appealed to the city’s Planning Commission to save them, but the commission voted 11-0 to approve the project.

As a graduate of the institution back in the days of its sleepy ambitions, charming folksiness and modest footprint, I suppose I should have a horse in the race. I do not, but I am as astonished as the next person that the opponents couldn’t have produced an endangered moth native to the grounds, or a couple of glyphs suggesting the land was home to the first female librarian to have championed the Dewey Decimal System.

Look! We found the remnants of her little log cabin! And her diary!

Not that they didn’t try. At the most recent council hearing on the matter, an opponent preposterously likened the arrival of the arena to a 19th-century taking of land from the Dakota. He should have thrown in a white buffalo, marking it as sacred land. The same opponent dug deeper with the imaginative stretch of trying to make the arena analogous to the interstate construction that uprooted Black families in the Rondo neighborhood.

Have you ever driven around down there? It’s a long way from Rondo.

Even the wisdom of Solomon cannot solve this conundrum. On the one hand, you have a successful school on its site since 1885. Its ambitions are no longer sleepy. It’s now a university, not the college of yesteryear. And they have been scrambling for athletics facilities since they went Division I, the big time. Opponents of the new arena might argue that they should have thought of that before they went Division I.

Ah, but they weren’t necessarily thinking D-1 when it happened in 2021. As a charter member of the MIAC, they had come to be regarded as, well, too proficient. They were kicked out, remember?

On the other hand, the neighborhoods around the school are some of the nicest in the city and terribly expensive to live in given the city’s irresponsible spending and its insatiable demand for unsustainable property-tax increases. It must feel like a punch in the gut to pay all that dough and now be wondering, “I hope I can park in front of my own house.”

It’s hard to pick a winner in a first-world problem. It’s either afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted.

We just don’t know who’s who.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Commentary: Revenge travel not flying so high these days

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Andrea Felsted | (TNS) Bloomberg Opinion

Revenge travel is losing its appeal.

After three years of rushing to book trips in the wake of pandemic-era restrictions, sharply higher fares, protests against tourism, fatigue from endless hours spent in airports and incomes squeezed by inflation are all taking their toll on travelers.

Travel demand is far from falling off a cliff. But there are signs that our wanderlust is downshifting from never-ending to a more normal pattern.

For airlines and tour operators, the next few months will be crucial in filling remaining seats and hotel rooms. If demand is strong, they will be able to sell leftover capacity at higher prices. But if consumers hold off, they’ll be forced to discount, something that hasn’t happened in the past three years.

In Europe, many people who were passionate about their vacations booked in January, in order to secure their preferred destination, hotel and even room. But in recent months, some consumers, particularly more budget-constrained families, have been holding off to see how their own finances, and holiday prices, developed. TUI AG, the world’s biggest tour operator, has sold about 60% of the vacations available this summer. That’s broadly in line with last year, but it’s still a lot of sunny breaks to shift in an uncertain environment.

European travelers are also shopping around. At Thomas Cook, now reborn as an online tour operator, bookings to Spain’s Balearic and Canary Islands are flat year-over-year. This reflects cost — you can get more for your money in Turkey, mainland Spain and Egypt — where sales are up. But anti-tourism protests in the Canary and Balearic islands may also be playing a part.

European consumers are still prepared to pay as much for their package holiday – well almost. TUI’s summer pricing is up 4%, close to the 5% increase reported a year earlier. But budget airlines Ryanair Holdings Plc and EasyJet Plc show that when it comes to air fares, consumers are reaching their limit.

Michael O’Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair, forecast that fares across its network this summer would be flat to 5% ahead, down from his previous prediction of a 5% to 10% increase, surprising given that capacity is constrained by delays to Boeing deliveries. Europe’s largest low-cost carrier has begun to cut ticket prices to fill its fleet.

There are signs that the U.S. travel recovery, now in its third year, is maturing too. For example, Marriott International Inc. said U.S. leisure revenue per available room, a key measure of hotel performance, was flat in its first quarter. Airbnb Inc. forecast that revenue would expand by 8% to 10% in the second quarter, the lowest level for three years. It’s possible this is a blip — Easter was earlier this year — and Airbnb expects a bounce in the summer months.

Indeed, the picture is complex. Some of the U.S. domestic weakness may reflect Americans traveling to Europe, emboldened by the strength of the dollar. This will likely have been boosted by one-offs, such as Taylor Swift’s concerts.

And this isn’t the only factor that makes the travel temperature so difficult to take. After wildfires in Greece last year, climate concerns are at the forefront of consumers’ minds. Yet this is spurring some unusual behaviors, such as some European customers booking long-haul flights to destinations such as Mauritius, where summer temperatures are more predictable, and, after price increases at some traditional Mediterranean resorts, the cost differential has narrowed.

As in other parts of the consumer economy, it may be that travel is polarizing, with the wealthy still splashing on trips further afield and top-notch accommodation, while those pressured by inflation and higher mortgage costs stick to a budget.

After the West’s travel boom — and potentially a return to more pedestrian levels – the industry is now looking East, to the return of Chinese visitors, particularly to Europe.

But for the coming weeks, short-term factors, such as elections in the U.K. and weather patterns – TUI said the winter season ended particularly strongly, likely boosted by cold and wet conditions – will matter most.

Being unable to spread our wings during the pandemic has reinforced our love of getting away, and we may never return to a situation where we are prepared to stay home. That doesn’t mean we won’t alter our behavior, like skipping a week away in spring or autumn, or, for example, forgoing a city break to preserve our main vacation.

There is much riding on this year’s peak summer season. Not only will it determine the level of profits at tour operators, hotels and airlines, but it will give the first glimpse of what a more settled post-pandemic travel market looks like.

——

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andrea Felsted is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering consumer goods and the retail industry. Previously, she was a reporter for the Financial Times.

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©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Older men die by suicide at steep rates. Here’s how the VA is trying to change that

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Emily Alpert Reyes | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — It was a Friday morning and George McCune had roused himself to make the 2.4-mile trip from his Northridge home to the Veterans Affairs campus in North Hills.

The 77-year-old was greeted there that March day by the usual crew training for the Golden Age Games: There was Roger, 82, who had piled up medals in javelin, discus and shot put. Bob, who had just gotten his cochlear implant. Becky, 71, bent on defeating her “nemesis” — a guy just six days her junior — in pingpong.

McCune can be reclusive, he said. He has grappled with post-traumatic stress disorder, he said, although he was never able to get formally diagnosed. Silent meditation is more of his usual speed than socializing.

Yet McCune routinely joins his teammates in the gym and on the track. He has yet to attend the Golden Age Games, a national competition for veterans 55 and older, but trains five days a week with the Greater Los Angeles team. That Friday, he had circled the track for 46 minutes, a goal he chose for the year of his birth.

And “more than the physical stuff is the mental stuff,” he said, “of getting me to interact with people.”

This might not be what you envision as “mental health” care, let alone “suicide prevention.” But at the VA, getting older veterans such as McCune together to hit the track is part of a broader push to improve their lives — and possibly even to save them.

Older men in the United States have been at growing risk. When suicides reached a historic high for the country in 2022, the sobering numbers were being driven up by their deaths. The starkest statistics were for men past their 75th birthdays, who were dying by suicide at more than twice the rate of men younger than 25.

Mike Dawson takes a lap around a track — backward — at the VA’s North Hills facility. (Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

The problem is “not new but it is overlooked — regularly overlooked,” said Thomas Joiner, a Florida State University psychologist who studies suicide and has written about the mental health of older men.

The grim pattern has persisted for years and is totally different from that among U.S. women, for whom suicide rates rise in middle age and then fall. Across the lifespan, men are much more likely than women to die by suicide, even though depression is much more common among women.

In Los Angeles County, the medical examiner tallied more than 300 such deaths in five years among men 75 and older — more than six times the number among women of the same ages, according to a Times analysis of the county figures.

Researchers have faulted a host of forces for the steeper rate of suicide as men reach their 70s and 80s. Joiner said men tend to suffer from worsening loneliness over the course of their lives in a way that differs from women, with “friendship networks falling apart over the decades.” Women seem to be better at maintaining ties after school or work stop giving them a source of peers, he said.

That isolation both whittles down the chances that someone will recognize men are in trouble before a suicide attempt, and makes it less likely that they will be quickly rescued if they attempt to end their lives, said Dr. Yeates Conwell, professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Their physical frailty as older adults also jeopardizes their chances of recovering from a suicide attempt.

Diseases and other ailments such as hearing loss can also worsen mental health as men age. And then there are the dangers of guns, which older men are more likely to own — and which make suicide attempts more deadly. In L.A. County, roughly two-thirds of suicide deaths among elderly men in recent years involved guns, far more than among older women, according to a Times analysis of county medical examiner data.

Despite the troubling pattern, “we don’t screen for suicide risk very well, and we especially don’t do it with older adults,” said Richard Frank, director of the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institution. Suicide risk screenings in emergency rooms are done less often with seniors, he said, with “a big drop-off after age 60.”

And for older adults, the criteria for a mental health diagnosis often miss people in need, Frank said. “They are hurting psychologically in ways that are not cleanly captured by our diagnostic approach to mental illness.”

In general, “our understanding of how to intervene is just emerging” in the last decade and a half, said Mike Hogan, a former New York state commissioner of mental health. Many suicide prevention theories revolve around “if we can protect people against the vulnerabilities that lead to it — so-called ‘upstream’ prevention.”

“That turns out to be very hard to do,” Hogan said. Suicide prevention strategies have also focused on limiting access to “lethal means,” such as installing barriers on tall structures, but Hogan said that has also been difficult when it comes to guns. Then there are targeted efforts to ask people whether they are at risk.

Arnie Ossen, 92, prepares to leave the VA’s North Hills facility after a day of pingpong. (Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

An effective approach is “basically asking people if they’re having those thoughts and — if they are — to then helping them” take steps to ensure safety, Hogan said. Yet such methods are “not yet in widespread use.”

Too often, medical providers “feel very uncomfortable asking” whether people have suicidal thoughts, said Julie Goldstein Grumet, director of the Zero Suicide Institute at the Education Development Center, which helps health systems adopt practices to prevent suicide. With older patients, physicians may think “this is just sort of a natural consequence of aging. … It doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to feel more sad as you age.”

Among the health systems that have grappled with the crisis is the Veterans Health Administration, which falls under the VA. Suicide has been an urgent issue for the health system in light of the alarming numbers among U.S. veterans, who have lost their lives to suicide at higher rates than the broader population.

Yet that isn’t the case for the oldest male veterans, according to Veterans Affairs figures. In 2021, elderly male veterans had lower rates of suicide, as calculated by the veterans system, than the figures reported by the National Center for Health Statistics for men ages 75 and older. And there was a promising downturn in their suicide rate between 2020 and 2021, especially among those who had recently used the health system.

Matthew Miller, director of the VA’s national suicide prevention program, said the agency has worked to weave risk assessment for suicide into its pain, sleep and oncology clinics, mindful that older patients may be at higher risk after getting troubling news about their health, especially if a gun is in reach. It has also done media outreach to urge older veterans to securely store firearms and medications.

The VA has also placed mental health professionals in the same facilities where veterans get day-to-day care. Roughly three-fourths of older adults who die by suicide have seen a primary care physician in the year before their death, researchers have found — a much higher percentage than had received mental health care — which has led to an increased focus on routine care as a route to thwart suicide.

At the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, Dr. Lucinda Leung said a patient might come in complaining of sleep problems. “Most of my patients don’t say, ‘I’m depressed. Please refer me to a psychiatrist,’” she said. (Older men are less likely than older women to state that they are lonely when asked directly, even in cases when indirect questions suggest similar levels of loneliness, researchers in Britain have found.)

But careful questioning might make clear that PTSD and nightmares are keeping that patient awake, Leung said. If that happens, she can walk the person down the hall to meet Dr. Suzie S. Chen, a clinical psychologist who can assess that patient the same day.

“Many of my patients are reluctant to speak to a mental health specialist or even admit to having psychological symptoms,” Leung said. Being able to immediately connect someone to mental health care on the same site helps it become “normalized.”

Chen agreed. “We’re not scary people — and mental health treatment doesn’t have to be a scary thing.”

Then there are programs that might not look, at first glance, like mental health care. Inside her office on the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center campus, Paige Velasquez turned to the camera on her computer, greeted the familiar faces signing on, and guided a virtual group through a series of exercises.

Ray Emmons gets in some morning stretches. (Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

“Let’s lean to the left. You should feel a nice stretch through this whole right side of your body now,” Velasquez instructed from behind her desk. “You guys feeling that today?”

As the group took a break from the exercises, she asked, “It’s Friday — anybody have plans for the weekend?”

“Yeah — to make it to Monday,” one veteran quipped.

The virtual groups meet Monday through Friday, connecting seniors who might be unable to make it to the San Fernando Valley campus for an exercise class. Velasquez, a recreation therapist, said that beyond the physical benefits, the regular meetings can ease isolation for older veterans.

Behind the computer screen or in person, recreation is a kind of “back door therapy,” Velasquez said. People think, “I’m golfing. That’s not therapy. Horseback riding — that’s not therapy. We’re just having fun.”

“You are! But fun is therapeutic.”

Hogan said the “surprising power” of such interventions is that “if people feel like they have meaning and purpose, and they’re connected to other people, it is extraordinarily less likely that they’ll die by suicide.”

When Roger Reitan retired, he found himself asking, “What am I going to do with myself?” The Granada Hills resident had served in the Navy, then worked as an accountant for more than two decades, commuting to downtown Los Angeles. Friendships seemed to wither after his accounting career ended, he said.

“I lost track of everybody,” Reitan said.

But now, “some of my best friends are right here.” The 82-year-old said he had competed for more than two decades in the Golden Age Games, proudly rattling off the many sports he had mastered.

The Los Angeles team has been preparing for the August games, which will be held this year in Salt Lake City. Nearly two dozen of its athletes are planning to attend. Ray Emmons, 76, said in March that when he first went last year — and won a bronze medal in pingpong — he was enthralled to watch blind veterans playing bocce ball.

“I just said, ‘This is for me,’” Emmons said.

But Velasquez said that for the veterans she coaches, the Golden Age Games is not just “something to look forward to once a year. It’s every week — training, seeing your friends, and making that connection.”

“That impacts mental health tremendously,” she said. “I’ve seen it.”

Pasqual Ramirez, 77, said in March that training with the team had helped him lose weight. He stopped relying on insulin. Beyond the physical changes, joining the group “made me realize that maybe I could live longer.”

“I used to be angry at the world,” Ramirez said. “In a way I felt let down.”

There were times in his life when he didn’t admit to having served in Vietnam, after protests broke out over the war, he said. His wife tells him he still has nightmares, although he doesn’t remember them.

What helped ease that anger was “this,” he said, gesturing around an echoing gym where his teammates were playing pingpong. “The camaraderie with people that went through similar situations.”

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©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.