• Erik Boquist, 27, has made a side gig out of helping older adults improve their tech skills.
• He charges $50 an hour, offering personalized guidance.
• Boquist said he enjoys the work because the older people he helps are grateful and "so sharp."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erik Boquist, 27, who lives in Sutton, New Hampshire, and travels the US and beyond working as a house-sitter with his girlfriend. Boquist also does video editing. His latest side gig is showing people, many of whom are older, how to level up their tech skills. Business Insider has verified his identity and that Boquist has earned money from these efforts. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I started thinking about training baby boomers on technology because of the simple tech tasks my mom needs help with and because I saw glimpses of my dad's workflow. Those were huge revelations.

It was everything from how they email, surf the web, and watch videos on YouTube. There might be simple things they don't know about, like changing the playback speed or using the arrows to go ahead or back five seconds.

My mother lives in a 55-plus community, and one day, after helping her, she said, "Erik, you should be doing this for everybody here."

Boom. She was right. If I'm going to help the community as much as possible, I just have to let people know I would be willing to talk with them.

My role is often vetting what they're hearing and then making money off researching it and determining if it's legit.

Other times, it might be simple things like someone wanting a box of markers to do crafts. I ask whether they've thought about Amazon and whether they have an account. If not, I might help them set it up.

I want the people I'm helping to realize that — whether they're able-bodied or not, they just need to be able to use their fingers. Dude, they're so sharp. You talk to somebody who's 80 years old — I'm not going to generalize, but I'm going to generalize — they can do what younger people can do on computers. I don't want older people's voices to be lost, the wisdom to be lost. I want them to express themselves.

I've been doing this for about six months. One of the things I'm working on now is digitizing the journals written by a woman's brother who passed away. The journals span decades.

She wants to get them into a PDF that can be shared with his friends. We're also thinking of using AI to create an audio recording of the entries. This can bring more remembrance of her brother's life and experiences because they're fascinating stories, and his voice is so interesting. Once it's digitized, she can even then play with text and make songs from the journal entries using AI.

That's why I sit down with people, usually IRL, and ask, "What do you want to do? What have you heard that interests you?"

Outside my parents, the first person I helped was my neighbor, who I always saw walking her dog. I was chatting with her, and she shared that she couldn't listen to audiobooks at night, which she had liked to do, because the battery on her phone kept dying.

I went on YouTube and used various search engines. The question became, "How do I replace a battery for an iPhone 7?" She's using an older phone, but it works for her. I'm not trying to sell her on a new one. Some of the reviews on battery-replacement kits were that the battery died 30 days after they were replaced. So, I suggested she avoid one seller, who was cheaper, and maybe go with an authorized battery replacer, who was $90. She said, "Oh, that's so great to know all this. Thank you so much. Let me pay you for this."

I told her no because it was a great lesson for me. That was the start of realizing, "Wow, that took me about 15 minutes." Then I shared all that with her in about 60 seconds, and it seemed to really impact her.

The business is essentially demystifying tech and bringing more knowledge to people.

It's been a great addition to my workflow. In recent months, I had three consistent clients. We talk about an hour at a time. It's not a 40-hour workweek by any means, but it's meaningful. So it's been four to 12 hours a week since I started, and I love it.

My fee is $50 an hour, and I haven't had the heart to bump it up. People are OK paying for it. Those who have called have been so enthusiastic. They're like, "Oh my gosh, I wish that somebody had been doing the sooner."

Every client surprises me. Someone might say something like, "I hear Bluesky is the opposite of X." Just hearing that brought me to dive deeper into that comparison. It's fascinating.

My girlfriend and I are heading to Seattle soon to house-sit for a family with a pair of beagles. We've been doing it for a couple of years now. There are coffee shops a two-minute walk from the place. I'll put up flyers there and at the grocery store, and we'll see what rolls in.

I've had sessions on FaceTime, but when I'm in person, people seem more likely to ask if I can come back the next week. Then, one of the things we work on is to go from cash or check to Venmo.

• Kyla Denwood and Lindsey O'Neal were part of a prestigious foreign service fellowship until DOGE cut USAID.
• The White House said a USAID foreign service fellowship wasn't in the national interest.
• Now they'll enter a tough job market for young grads.

After years of preparing for a career in the US foreign service, Kyla Denwood and Lindsey O'Neal were set to head overseas in June for their first assignment.

Denwood and O'Neal had just completed a competitive, two-year graduate fellowship sponsored by the US Agency for International Development. The fellowship provided up to $104,000 in tuition, living expenses, and internships to 30 students. Fellows then served at least five years in the USAID Foreign Service.

"This is something I've been working toward for years," Denwood, 26, a graduate of Georgetown University, told Business Insider. "I was almost there. To just have it blow up is not a good feeling."

Those plans evaporated within days, following the Trump administration's decision to gut USAID's staff and programs.

"During the pandemic, there was one reality one day, and then a completely different one the next day," O'Neal, 29, a graduate of American University, said. "It was such a stark change. That's how this feels."

Denwood and O'Neal are among millions of students graduating into a precarious job market, including some who had positions lined up at federal agencies only to have them rescinded by Elon Musk's DOGE. As hiring in white-collar professions slowed in recent years, young grads had increasingly been applying to entry-level jobs in government, according to the job site Handshake. Now, what was once considered a more secure career path has been upended.

Denwood and O'Neal are now searching for backup plans in the private or nonprofit sectors, where they'll have to compete with thousands of other foreign service professionals who've also lost their USAID jobs. While Denwood and O'Neal are hopeful that their expertise in business development and urban ecology, respectively, will have broad appeal, they are equally as worried about a long-term setback in their career.

The USAID Donald M. Payne International Development Graduate Fellowship Program targets students from backgrounds historically underrepresented in foreign service who demonstrate financial need. A Trump administration official told Business Insider in an email that it was "determined to not fit within the standards" laid out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio for US foreign assistance, which "must make the United States stronger, safer, or more prosperous."

On March 10, Rubio announced that 83% of USAID's programs were being canceled, and the remainder would be absorbed into the State Department.

"The 5200 contracts that are now canceled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States," Rubio wrote in a post on X. "Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform."

Cuts to US foreign service overseas

Both Denwood and O'Neal were raised by single moms. Denwood said she lived in working-class neighborhoods around the US while O'Neal grew up in a Puerto Rican enclave in Palmetto, Florida. They said the fellowship gave them a pathway to graduate school and the US foreign service that otherwise wouldn't have been feasible.

O'Neal had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana. She applied twice for the Payne fellowship before winning the award. During grad school at American University, she spent a summer internship in Cairo shadowing USAID officials who were trying to help finance projects related to water, food, and energy security.

Denwood specialized in business and economic development and spent a summer internship in Ghana and Togo working with farmers and manufacturers trying to expand trade with the US. She planned to continue that work as a USAID private enterprise officer in Africa, which has some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

That future came to a halt on February 26, when USAID officially terminated the Payne fellowship, according to a letter viewed by Business Insider.

Piper Campbell, chair of American University's Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security and a former US ambassador, said international development is critical to US national security. This includes disease detection and response and strengthening foreign markets for American businesses.

"Republican and Democratic administrations over the last 60 years have consistently cited the three D's — development, diplomacy, and defense — as critical tools of national security," Campbell said. "So it's surprising to me to hear an administration taking such a radically different approach.

Campbell added that she attended a recent conference in Seol among international security leaders, where Chinese officials were "grinning" during discussions about the US retreat from foreign aid because they are eager to fill the gap.

Campbell said slashing USAID programs, including the Payne fellowship, undermines US interests abroad.

'This is all I've been preparing for'

Tonija Hope, director of Howard University's international affairs center, helps students plan their careers.

"How do I counsel students who for so long I've told to consider USAID? Where do they go now?" Hope said. "They can't consider USAID or any of the companies or organizations that worked with the agency. There was a whole ecosystem that is gone."

Hope said that without USAID funding, fellows who are halfway through their graduate degrees are scrambling to find money for tuition and living expenses. Many universities can cover a year of tuition, Hope said, but not living expenses.

Miguel Lua-Reyes, 31, is a Payne fellow pursuing his graduate degree at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. He said he hasn't received any communication from USAID about what he thought would be a paid summer internship abroad, funding for a second year of grad school, and a foreign service appointment after graduation.

Lua-Reyes said Texas A&M officials have assured him they would try to provide support, including matching the funding provided by the Payne fellowship. However, that aid is dependent on the availability of funding, Lua-Reyes said.

"I left a career in K-12 and higher education when I accepted the fellowship," Lua-Reyes, who said he applied three times before being accepted. "I wanted to continue the same meaningful work I had done as a Youth in Development Volunteer with the Peace Corps in Guatemala."

Denwood and O'Neal said they felt fortunate to have finished their graduate degrees before DOGE arrived in Washington, DC. But O'Neal said that gratitude is also overshadowed by enormous uncertainty about the future.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," O'Neal said. "On one hand, it feels like a blank slate. On the other hand, this is all I've been preparing for and it's my dream job. I can't imagine another career that fits what I'm built for."

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