Millennial Students Today

You know it's funny, thanks to being amongst the recently unemployed, I have had a lot more time to read. I read a few things lately that interested me, one was a blog post I read on the millennial generation :

http://info.aia.org/nwsltr_nacq.cfm?pagename=nacq_090122_kennedy

It's about the Millennial Generation, that is to say, the college students of today. I encourage you to read the post, it interestingly enough talks about generational predictors effecting architecture (perhaps some of our Tau Epsilon bros may find it interesting).

The blog post was a follow-up to a book I read, which, oddly enough I had sitting around the house, but that I hadn't read in college (even though I had it from a sociology class I had taken). It was called Generations: The History of Americas Future and it was published in 1991.

Seriously, it is interesting, even if the book is a load, to think of generations as cyclical. And, the facts that are most interesting are how the current generation is "hard to define" in where it begins and ends...as the book says itself there are always outliers (those older who are representative of a younger generation, and those younger who act like older generations), but generational studies look at norms, not outlying data (meaning, looking at what's typical, not what's unusual)....and from that, we can learn a lot about the guys who are coming into OR who are already in and leading our organization today!

For example, I am considered on the "cusp" of the millennial movement, depending on if you believe that millennial students were born starting in 1977, 1980, or 1982 (if 1980 is the cut-off year....my younger sister gets in, if 77 is the cutoff, so do I, lol) to those people born in either 1997, 2000, or 2002 respectively (a GENERATION is considered a 20 year birth period).

There are so many interesting facts about this group. First of all, the births taking place from 1980 to 2000 OUTNUMBER the births that took place during the baby boom years....you are bigger then THE BIGGEST generation in American History! And, yet, during the time when our parents were typically "growing up" the world was anti-baby as marked by advances in birth control, and even movies of the time....starting with Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Exorcist II, The Exorcist III, Omen, Omen II, Omen III, Carrie, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. Which was a sharp contrast to the period of the 1950's when the popular movies were feel good movies and where childhood was considered valuable. What does that say about this current generation?

Even beyond what was going on in society was how the Millennial Generation developed...when the Internet "came out" (and no, Al Gore didn't invent it), we were told that was the "end" of community but look at how community has been "redefined" with social networking like facebook making it's way to center stage (they even had a facebook movie, lol). It demonstrates that the events which hit the millennial generation have created more of a community. In our parents' generation, the baby boomers, we watched as the world became individualistic and revolutionary, so revolutionary that 1968 had an unprecedented number of assassinations in American history, and only a few years earlier a Presidential assassination would become the defining event of that generation (for our grandparents it was Pearl Harbor as the defining event).

Consider those revolutionary changes to the changes we have faced that have almost forced us to be more community driven: 9/11, the biggest recession in American history since the Great Depression, and the election of an African-American man to the Whitehouse...

Some have labeled this millennial generation as the generation that can and will change the world because they have been told that they can and, who knows, perhaps they will. Either way, in a fraternal sense, it is definitely something interesting to consider...if this generation is supposed to be defined as "communal" as opposed to "individualistic" then our fraternity or any fraternity would be a perfect vehicle...so how do we get ourselves in the "frame of mind" to accept and attract these men into our organization?