Welcome Class of 2012

A friend of mine asked me the other day if he was getting old. After spending a large portion of Saturday in the hot sun, getting up at 4 a.m. to spend Sunday morning out in the sun again, as well as doing some swimming and biking; he was a bit dismayed that he could only make it through 3 innings of a baseball game Sunday evening and was heading for home around 7:30 p.m. Since we are about the same age (I'm 8 months younger, though) I'm supposed to have an answer. Actually everyone knows how I feel about age - we're not getting older, we're getting better. As Dara Torres stated "Age is just a number". Since she just won her first ever individual Olympic silver medal at age 41, and she's bigger and stronger than me, I'm not going to argue with her.

I will freely admit that there are times when I do feel my aging a bit - the realization that I am the same age or older as the parents of many of my summer camp kids including the ones in middle school, my approaching 20 year high school reunion, my niece Emily, who was born when I was 23, starting high school in a few days. These things occasionally cause me to feel my aging. Of course, as long as I continue to get the response "No way!" when people find out how old I am, what does it really matter?

Anyway, since the subject of aging came up, I thought I would aid my friend in feeling old. As college campuses around the country prepare for the start of the fall semester, they also prepare to welcome a new batch of freshman. I thought I would share the Beloit College Mindset List with you. The following paragraphs are from the Beloit College Website. Due to it's length, I put the list into a slideshow below. The list in text form can be viewed here.

This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow.

Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. The List is shared with faculty and with thousands who request it each year as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation.

The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.

Students entering college for the first time this fall were generally born in 1990.

For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.