Anyone know where I can find this guide to young students?

[andrewducker]

There used to be a yearly page that was published by a university somewhere which said "This year's students were born in 2007, and they grew up with brain implants and jetpacks, and they are used to politicians having tentacles, and their popular icons are zombies and robot dogs, and they have no memory of The Great War or music coming on tapes."

And it was always amusing to read each year, and see people's reactions to it when they realised that they were now terribly, terribly old.

And I'm darned if I can remember where that was, or what the university was.

Anyone?

Comments

[lilysea]

Harvard?

[drplokta]

Beloit College, Wisconsin. Found it easily enough by Googling for "this year's freshmen". This year's list can be found here.

[theandrewhickey]

Not a particularly funny list for those of us outside the US, this year -- and at least one entry early on is wrong. Putin didn't become President of Russia until January 1, 2000 (I remember because Yeltsin's resignation was unexpected and on New Year's Eve)

[drplokta]

I believe their assumption is that children aged under two are unlikely to notice who the President of Russia is, and so for someone born in 1998 anyone who has been President of Russia since about 2003 or earlier has always been President of Russia.

[theandrewhickey]

Ah, that makes more sense, yes.

[calimac]

I would certainly make such an assumption. My mother was 16 when FDR died, so she was 4 when he was inaugurated, but she always said that his death had struck her hard because, for her, he had always been President.

Also relevant for Putin's case was that it's now perhaps forgotten that there was a term (2008-12) when Putin wasn't President of Russia - but come on, he was no less in charge and everybody knew it.

[conuly]

I think their cutoff is "around entering kindergarten/first grade".

I mean, I just remember the fall of the Berlin Wall (because my father insisted we watch it on TV) but... I had no idea why it was important, what it was, any of that. By the time I was old enough to have even the barest notion of geopolitics, the USSR was long gone.

[njj4]

If I've done my sums right, October's new first year undergraduates will be younger than two of my degrees (BA 1994, MSc 1998). I was talking about this sort of thing to my head of department a few years ago and he said "recently a student came up to me and said 'apparently you taught my dad when he was at university'" which made me feel slightly better about things.