Starting a family is exciting, but it’s also a jump into the deep end. As “young urban professionals,” my wife and I for the first years of our marriage weren’t in a hurry to have children. We were both happily focused on our careers. Seemingly everyone around us was just as preoccupied with finding success and getting ahead.
Choosy. Spoiled. Talented but lazy. Those are just a few of the terms we’ve heard managers and HR professionals use to describe millennials and Gen Z-ers, as they struggle to decode colleagues in their 20s and 30s.
It’s the culture shock of loneliness: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close friends on campus. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Even as you go through a tough cultural shock, you can come out having a good social experience.
In November of 2006, I went to visit my university friend Maarten in cold and rainy Leicester. At the time, there were two things we could never have predicted: First, that this town would ever be the home of a Premier League champion, and second, that we would be part of the last generation to participate in the EU Erasmus exchange program there. Yet, ten years later, the former has happened and the latter looks astonishingly likely.
