Ms. Muscatello’s journey illustrates how hard that can be.

When I went to visit her a second time at her internship, she was sitting quietly behind the front desk dressed in black slacks and golf shirt. She had a laminated cheat sheet on the desk by her side that her job coach, Angela McPheeters, had made for her. It had all the staff names, their job titles and their extensions in large print.

An administrative assistant sat by her side, giving her the day’s assignment: to empty black binders that had been used for a recent conference, remove the tabs, and place them in a box on the floor. Ms. Muscatello also worked the phones. But when she picked up a call for someone in the entrepreneurship office, she got confused and couldn’t say the word. Another time, pressing the buttons gave her trouble. Her supervisor had told her that if she got better with the phones, there was a good chance they’d hire her.

When Ms. McPheeters got wind of this, she sent Ms. Muscatello home to practice with a photocopy of a telephone with the numbers pad on it and her cheat sheet. She spent days on it, after work and on weekends, announcing: “Hi, I.V.M.F. This is Meghan. Can I help you?” She tapped on the paper numbers with her index finger, as if she were transferring the calls.

But when the semester ended, the supervisor said that funding had been cut and they were not going to be able to hire Ms. Muscatello. “I was a little bit disappointed,” she told me.

A few weeks later, in a cap-and-gown ceremony at a chapel on the main quad, this year’s graduates received their certificates. One now has a job doing clerical work in a municipal office. Another has a position as a shop technician at a carpet cleaning company.

As for Ms. Muscatello, she spent weeks eagerly waiting, her résumé, letter of recommendation and interview outfits, free of cat hair, ready to go. Then one morning she was called in for an interview — and aced it. This month she is expected to begin working the front desk at a YMCA. She got her dream job.