Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014

Phone Cords: Foreign to the Class of 2014 

How does the Class of 2014 be different from the older generations? For an funny answer to this doubt, check out the Beloit College Mindset List.

So who are these young college newbies who are about to enroll college campuses around the nation as the Class of 2014?

Annually, Beloit College – a liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin – issues its popular and extremely amusing Beloit College Mindset List. This year's list, which was released on August 17, 2010, provides a visibility of the life view of students who are about to get into college. Most of these pupils were born between 1991 and 1993. The primary aim of the list was to remind professors to "see their citations," as their pupils could not think of outcomes, technologies, and other particulars that seem like basic knowledge to older generations.

Here are a few of the highlights from the Beloit College Mindset List.

Political Knowledge (and Deficiency of Knowledge)
As masses get older, they're stunned at what younger people can't call back. Whereas professors and parents might remember Vietnam and Watergate, the Class of 2014 simply acknowledges nearly these events from their history books. This group of youthful people was born after the Reagan years, and a few were even born past the Bush presidency. The Class of 2014 has brilliant childhood memories of 9/11, and less-than-vivid childhood memories of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which their parents likely did not want them to know too much about.

Here are a few political tidbits from the Mindset List:

• Czechoslovakia has never existed.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg has all of the time sat on the Supreme Court.
• They've never concerned about a Russian missile bang on the U.S.

Pop Culture References
Among the quickest affairs that switches in a generation is popular culture. Hence, a few of the funniest features about the Beloit Mindset List are references to what the Class of 2014 sees as common sense references to popular culture, and that older generations see as odd contrasts to the method things accustomed be not so long ago.

Pop culture references on this year's Beloit Mindset List include:

• Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.
• Beethoven all of the time represented a dog.
• Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

Ever-changing Technology
Some other fast changing aspect of daily life is technology. Compared to their professors and parents, the Generation Y students of today have always resided in a world of fast-changing and ever-present technology. Where "aged" masses might have grown in a world without mobile phone* and computing device* – let alone Facebook and Twitter – the Class of 2014 can't even imagine a world where these things weren't commonplace.

Technology acknowledgments in this year's Mindset List include:

• Computers have never missed a CD-ROM disk drive.
• Email is just too slow.
• They never twisted the curled handset cable without aim about their wrists while chatting on the phone.

So is Beloit's Mindset List of value to professors as they interact with arriving freshmen? Perhaps. If anything, it supplies amusive insight into how things are always changing, and how life as a university student now is so different than it used to be.

For more useful articles on Campus Life, check out this College Freshman Year Survival Guide and Ten Study Skills Articles that Every Student Should Read.



Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014