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What I'm thinking about...

Hi Reader,

For a long time, there was a map. 🗺 Get good grades, earn the degree, and a job would be waiting. Employers supplied the ladder. Your school supplied the credential. Your job was to show up, do the work, and let the magic GPA number speak for you.

If that map has felt broken to you lately, you are not imagining it. It is broken.

What the numbers say

Recent college graduates now have a higher unemployment rate than the workforce overall. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, it is about 5.6% for recent grads versus 4.2% for adults overall. Before this decade, that had never happened in the Fed's data going back to 1990.

Here is the part that matters most right now. When hiring managers explain why a new grad did not work out, they almost never mention technical skills. In a ResumeTemplates.com survey of 1,000 hiring managers, the top reason was lack of motivation or initiative (48%), followed by professionalism (39%) and time management (38%).

But where is that inside the curriculum? 🫤

The future of work does not need another 4.0

Your GPA measures one thing: how well you performed in a course. It is a position in time. It tells an employer where you were, not where you are going, or who you are, or whether you can get there on your own.

What employers are hiring for now is harder to fake and harder to grade:

📌 Agency. Do you take the first step without being told to? Do you go find the answer, the person, the opportunity, instead of waiting for someone to hand it to you?

📌 Motivation. Are you self-motivated or do you want to be told what to do?

📌 Judgment. When there is no rubric, can you figure out what matters, decide what to do, and explain why?

Three things to do this semester

1️⃣ Treat career readiness like a real class. Not a finals week workshop. Not a career center you visit once. Block time for it every week, the same way you would for a course that counts toward your degree.

2️⃣ Keep a record of your own growth. A grade tells you where you are. What employers want to see is direction and speed. Keep a running note of what you tried, what you learned, and what you would do differently. In six months that note is your story, and it will be more convincing than any number.

3️⃣ Ask about the unwritten rules. Professors, alumni, career advisors, and the professionals who visit your classes want to be asked. Asking is not a sign you are behind. It is the first piece of evidence that you have agency.

The GPA had a hundred year run. It sorted a world that no longer exists, and it never sorted it fairly. What comes next will be decided by students who stopped waiting to be sorted. 💯

Start now.

Jen Elena Romano, CEO & Founder | Cura, Inc.

🎙 Training for the Career You Want: Feedback, Motivation, Resilience with Coach Joe Romano

This months Cura Chat was with Coach Joe Romano, a coach and college counselor at Bellarmine College Prep, who has spent years coaching lacrosse at the college, professional, and youth levels while also guiding students through the transition from university to career. 🥍

The conversation opened with a lesson Joe keeps coming back to in both worlds: control what you can control, and stay present instead of worrying about what's next.🌟 From there, he covered how to give and receive feedback without getting defensive, what to do when you disagree with it, and why setting real, measurable goals beats "just try your best" when there's no clear win in sight.

Here's what stood out:

• Attitude and effort are skills, not traits. 🌱 Many first-gen students never had someone reinforce this early on, but it's a skill you can build starting now.
• Not all feedback is good feedback. 🤔 The person giving it isn't always right or well-trained at delivering it, so you're allowed to weigh it rather than take it as fact.
• Disagree with curiosity, not defense. 💡 Try "tell me more" or "help me understand" instead of pushing back. It lowers tension and shows your manager you're invested in your own growth.
• Redefine what winning looks like. 📣 When there's no clear win in sight, swap vague encouragement for a specific, measurable goal you can actually hit to keep pushing forward.

Keep an eye on our YouTube channel for this conversation and more Cura Chats coming soon! ✨

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✹ The Wellness Corner ✹

Cura comes from cura personalis: care for the whole person.

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Make Money Make Sense

Textbook prices are the first back-to-school gut punch nobody warns you about, and full price at the bookstore is almost never your only move. 📚 Ask your professor if an older edition works just as well. Most of the time the content barely changes, and it's a fraction of the price. Your city's library is another free option: just search "library card" plus your city name, and you can usually sign up online in minutes. Check out this TikTok for more ways to find cheap books. Five minutes of checking around now can save you real money before the semester even starts. 💵

Mental Health

That back-to-school anxiety hitting right now is more normal than it feels. 😟Most students deal with some version of it every year. A few small things can genuinely help: naming what's actually stressing you out instead of pushing it down, focusing on the parts you're excited for, and easing into a routine before the semester fully takes over instead of after. Check out the first few minutes of this YouTube video for more tips on managing it. You don't have to have it all figured out by day one. You just need one or two small habits to lean on when it gets overwhelming. 🙌🏼

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​As always, please text CURA to 741741 for ongoing FREE mental health bilingual crisis volunteers. Our friends at Crisis Text Line offer 24/7, bilingual text support. 💛

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Partners We Love We Are All Human is a nonprofit built on a simple idea: Latinos are a driving economic and cultural force in the U.S., not just a demographic. Through its Hispanic Star initiative, the organization connects Latino leaders, companies, and changemakers to open up real opportunities, backed by data and research, not just good intentions. It also spotlights Latino talent and stories that too often go unrecognized. Check them out if you're looking for a community that's actively investing in Latino success. Learn more

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