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Class of 2014, you may or may not know who this is...

Every year professors from Beloit College put together a list of characteristics to descibe the incoming university student (this year it is those born in 1992).  This list, known as the Mindset List, aims to reflect current and past popular culture shifts, and to give us all an idea what reality our current young adults are living in. The list highlights key cultural and political changes that have shaped this year´s generation, and reminds us how quickly references become dated.  If you can believe it, the class of 2014 is a “post-email” generation; they don´t email because it is just “too slow.” Our recent high school graduates live in a world of fast technology and extreme multi-tasking.   This list, while not scientific by any means, is a fun tradition at Beloit College to mark differences in generations, which when we stop to observe, pass us by in the blink of an eye.

Here are a few items from this year’s incoming freshman college students (born in 1992) that made the list.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

31. The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

For this year´s complete Mindset List click here.

Tags: Beloit College, College, Mindset List, University