Trapped in a Facebook Time Warp
Dec 13th
Evan*, a 21-year-old student at USC, doesn’t expect any surprises when the time comes for his high school reunion. He knows the star quarterback hasn’t won the Heisman trophy and that the senior prom queen ended up marrying her high school sweetheart.
Although he hasn’t actually seen them, he’s friends with them on Facebook.
In previous generations, people went off to college and started a new phase of their life. They kept in touch with a few of their closest friends through letters, telephone and on visits home. They broke up with their boyfriends and girlfriends, cut ties and rarely heard from them again.
Today the Internet and social media are changing how people move forward from relationships. Through websites like Facebook, the constant connections make it easier for people to keep in touch with–and keep tabs on–friends and ex-lovers. A study at Michigan State University found that 96% of the students surveyed used Facebook to connect with high school friends. The study showed that people seek to keep ties with friends often in an attempt to get rid of feelings of ‘friendsickness,’ “the distress caused by the loss of old friends.”
But this interaction can make it harder for young people to move forward and let go of people from their past.“Every relationship is one in which you potentially can’t get away from,” said Stuart Fischoff, Senior Editor of the Journal of Media Psychology. “There are so many different forms of communication like email and Skype. Each one exposes you to more and more.” Read the rest of this entry »
First-Generation Collegians: Their Families’ Hope
Dec 13th
Of his six brothers and sisters, Mike Rodriguez,* a Fordham University senior, is the only child in his family who will graduate from college.
The words his mother told him before he began his freshman year are seared in his mind: “You are my only hope,” she said as he pushed a half-filled grocery cart back to their apartment in Washington Heights. He stared at her blankly: never before was it so clear that his future or his family’s future rested on him going to college.
“I’m carrying the family’s banner,” he said. “It’s my job to increase our status, so my mother can have the life she dreams of and my kids can have more than I do.”
While his parents came to America from the Dominican Republic for factory work to fulfill the “American Dream,” Rodriguez carries the responsibility to take the dream one step further by using college to establish his family as well educated and financially successful.
Will Gen. Y Rock the Vote?
Dec 13th
The streets were overflowing as a brisk November air rushed through New York City. Car horns blared, music boomed and all around eager 20-somethings, many sitting on each other’s shoulders, cheered wildly: a veritably frenzy perhaps only matched in intensity by the sheer chaos that is New Year’s Eve. But the thousands huddled in Times Square that night, basking in the glow of neon lights and flash bulbs, were not there to ring in the New Year. Rather, it was election night.
In 2008, then Senator Barack Obama was propelled into the White House largely on the backs of young voters. Sold on the idea of change they could believe in, Generation Y voted in record numbers and dispelled the notion that it was apathetic when it came to politics.
But now just four short years later, with the unemployment rate dauntingly high, this generation’s youthful enthusiasm has come face to face with a bleak reality. While in 2008, it seemed that Obama held a monopoly over this generation’s votes, that may no longer be the case. Millennials are still a highly sought commodity but now considered a more available one, with candidates on both sides of the political spectrum vying for their attention. So the question becomes: What role will Generation Y will play in this election cycle? Read the rest of this entry »
A Real Morning Person
Dec 13th
Weekday mornings, Arwa Gunja is up at 2:45 a.m. She jumps in the shower, gets dressed and by 2:55 a.m., she’s out the door. A short car ride later, she’s at the WNYC studios in downtown Manhattan — most days, she’s the first one there.
Gunja, a 2007 NYU graduate, is the line producer for WNYC’s early morning radio program “The Takeaway.” And though she thought her prospects for a journalism job after college were bleak, with hard work, dedication and a little bit of luck, Gunja is now running a nationally syndicated news show with an audience approaching one million. She readily admits it’s further than she imagined being just four short years ago. And though the hours are taxing on the young producer, she knows that news never sleeps. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Didn’t He Text Me Back?
Dec 13th
Even though Ann was doing everything in her power to focus in her Film Editing class, the thought running through her mind was, “Why hasn’t he texted me back?” Ann just met cute, funny guy and on Friday night he took her out on a date. Saturday night they met up at a mutual friend’s party Now it was Wednesday and she still hasn’t received a response to a text she sent Sunday: “Want to go to a movie tonight?”. She couldn’t seem to think of a plausible reason on why he was MIA.
Ann Lupo, an NYU junior, isn’t alone when it comes to relationship uncertainty caused by texting. The days of “check yes or no” notes have been replaced with coy digital communications that can deceive, shroud, and confuse. “The reality is that I text a lot and am just as guilty of over analyzing as the next person,” said Ann. “It makes it difficult to decipher the exact meaning behind a text.”
Texting provides an outlet for people to play mind games and takes place in a world with no exact definition of dating; no set rituals as experienced by older generations. Easily misunderstood, texts are a tool that allows sending a message that normally wouldn’t be Read the rest of this entry »
Prayer Without The Pews
Dec 13th
After growing up traditionally Mormon in Minneapolis, Theresa Akers, 21, thought she would never drink alcohol, wear revealing clothing or date someone she didn’t intend to marry. However, after arriving at New York University and meeting other students from a variety of backgrounds she began to adhere to Mormon traditions less and less. Akers no longer goes to church or subscribes to any religion.
With instant access to any kind of people and information, Gen Y is known for being accepting of diversity and being highly individualistic. More and more members of Gen Y are shifting away from traditional religious concepts, or even identifying with a specific religion at all. Instead, many millenials are looking to make their beliefs work with their lifestyle. They want to customize their faith. This allows millennials to maintain their beliefs without feeling the need to adhere to religious tradition and rules. Read the rest of this entry »
Generation “whY” questions religion
Dec 13th
Even in secular America, Sunday mornings are still synonymous with church. Whether just for Easter and Christmas Eve or weekly services, many young adults look back on childhood memories of donning a pretty dress or a clip-on tie and snoozing through some sort of religious service. But as they have matured, 18- to 25-year-old Americans have drifted away from the churches of their youth in search of a different sort of religious life.
For children raised in religious households, the transition into college – and an independent lifestyle – often propels young adults to reevaluate their religious views. Many choose to continue a variation of the religious lifestyle taught to them by their parents, others redefine their religion in terms of their own “spirituality” and still some establish an entirely new religious outlook. Read the rest of this entry »
The D.I.Y. Retirment Generation
Dec 13th
As a financial behavior psychologist for Gen Y, business has never been better for Matt Wallaert.
What started out in college as giving casual advice to friends on saving and spending behaviors turned into a full-time career for Wallaert. The millennial entrepreneur has already founded several Gen Y finance advice websites including getraised.com, a “go get em’” promotion advisement service for underpaid workers.
But despite all the advice the PhD candidate dolled out in college and on his websites, there is still one area of Gen Y finances that still has Wallaert and fellow millenials on their heels: saving for retirement. Read the rest of this entry »
Nostalgia Hits the 90s Babies
(One More Time)
Dec 13th
For a generation that’s barely lived a quarter of their lives, millennials seem prematurely nostalgic for their youth. But thanks to the Internet and modern media, icons of yesterday are in the palms of Generation Y hands.
Youngsters of the 1990s had it easy. Days were spent delighting in Nickelodeon’s “Doug,” snacking on Fruit-By-The Foot, collecting Beanie Babies and crooning along to the latest tune by The Backstreet Boys. For many 90s kids, the biggest struggles adolescence presented were choosing which Goosebumps book to read next, parenting those pesky Tamagotchis, and deciding if Sugar Ray was, in fact, a better band than Matchbox 20. Flash-forward to the present day and those same 90s kids, now college aged or recently graduated, are still infatuated with their icons of yore.
Sex Ed 101: What You Didn’t Learn
Dec 13th
College sex educators have found that many students have basic questions about sexuality that should have been answered in sex ed courses in middle school or high school. Here are the most common misconceptions that college students have about sex, and the ways that educators attempt to remedy them.
Dr. Paul Joannides is a walking-talking sex-advice column, minus the diva plus ten years of graduate school. Traveling from college-to-college across the United States, Joannides lectures students on the female orgasm, pornography, contraception and other sex-related topics. His book, “The Guide to Getting It On,” may make parents uncomfortable—what with the Grecian god cartoons with swollen, foot-long penises—but Joannides aims to change unhealthy, common misconceptions that college students have about sex through the frank discussion of topics that most kids weren’t taught in middle school or high school.