As the class of 2020 graduates into the coronavirus pandemic, Seattle millennials share how they rebounded from the Great Recession

In the summer of 2009, after graduating from college, I sat in the audience at Town Hall at the only wake I have ever attended for a newspaper. The deceased was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and as I sat there in my summer dress listening to public mourning for a newsroom, the outsized loss I felt was bigger than the fate of any particular outlet. With print media jobs virtually nonexistent in the financial crisis I had graduated into, I was grieving the future I’d imagined for myself.

For the class of 2020, graduating into the coronavirus pandemic will mean reckoning with that kind of grief. Seattle Times economics columnist Jon Talton says the degree to which a recession affects graduates’ career trajectories depends on their skills and field of study, but in general, “graduates that enter the job market during a rec