She never imagined that the crossing of the desert would be so long. When she completed her master's degree in design, in 2016, in a public higher education school in Montauban, Lucie (who did not wish to give her last name) experienced a real slump. In Occitanie, the region where she has just finished her studies and where she is from, job offers corresponding to her level of qualification are rare, “for a lot of requests”. In her field, she notes that a single region concentrates most of the positions: Ile-de-France. But, for this daughter of a storekeeper and a home helper, it is unthinkable to “go to Paris”. “It would have required too many sacrifices: I had a student loan of 10,000 euros to repay, and my parents would not have been able to help me with the cost of living there”confides Lucie.
After taking a job as a saleswoman, due to a lack of offers in her discipline, she agreed to move to Brittany for a fixed-term contract as a graphic designer assistant, paid “not much more than the minimum wage”. She went on to several short contracts with barely higher salaries, “despite a bac + 5”. Four years after leaving school, dissatisfied, she finally chose to start her own business in La Rochelle, creating logos and advising on ready-to-wear collections. “It’s starting to work well, even if it’s not easy every day”says the 31-year-old graphic designer today, who cannot help but notice how much easier integration was for her comrades who moved to Paris.
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