Entry by Pat Patterson
If you are a career services professional or faculty member enticing freshmen to visit the career office for the first time, it is important to know more about your audience. Consider Beloit College’s mindset list for the class of 2014:
- Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
- Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
- Al Gore has always been animated.
- “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
- Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren’t afraid of immigration…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.
- Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
- Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.
- Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.
- Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.
- Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.
- They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.
- DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.
- Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.
- Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.
- Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
- They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
- “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows.
- Czechoslovakia has never existed.
- Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.
- Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.
- Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.
- There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.
- American companies have always done business in Vietnam.
- They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college.
- Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.
- Someone has always gotten married in space.
- While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States.
- Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.
- Wal-Mart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48.
- Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
- Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.
- They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.
- It seems the Post Office has always been going broke.
- The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.
For the complete list, click here – FYI, Beloit College has a mindset list for each class since 1998.
