To my class friends
(04/19/11 9:00am)
I have learned a lot during my four years at Duke, but one of the most important things I’ve learned is how to be efficient with my time.
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I have learned a lot during my four years at Duke, but one of the most important things I’ve learned is how to be efficient with my time.
I’m a girl who never leaves her planner at home. Whether it’s my French homework, an upcoming column deadline or a midweek birthday dinner in Chapel Hill, I always write it down.
My phone buzzed late one night last weekend. “WTF,” the text message read. “I knew I shoulda gone to Mardi Gras. All these Facebook pics! Ugh. Woulda been TOML. OMG. And now I’ve got a severe case of FOMO. SOMFL.”
When I tire of Facebook, Shopbop and Sporcle, I often come home and take my procrastinations to my closet. There, I like to rummage through my wardrobe, searching for old clothes to donate to Goodwill. This task never proved to be overly daunting until this past weekend when I decided to skip the hanging clothes and sift through the dreaded ... (drum roll, please) ... T-shirt drawer.
I’ve found that in light of recent events, I sometimes hesitate to share the fact that I’m a Dukie with strangers.
I admit it. My taste in music is eclectic at best. Cut me some slack, though—I’m from Atlanta. Somehow, the ATL boasts the title of “hip hop capital of the world” but is conveniently located 100 miles north of some of the most twangy, country lovin’ folks around.
Last week, I saw something very moving.
It feels like every time I turn around, somebody somewhere is trying to become better. Complacency? That doesn’t exist at Duke University. That ole saying, “you are enough” doesn’t apply in a world where the drive for a 4.0 seems to dictate all. “Better,” I realize, is a broad term, so let me elaborate based on my recent Duke fieldwork.
I have distinct memories of sitting in the backseat of the Lester family 1999 Ford Expedition. Even though there were only two of us, my brother and I would fight over the middle seat of the third row, leaving what seemed to be an immensity of space between the driver and us.
Every so often, I try to read a “book that matters.” You know the ones I’m talking about—”The Great Gatsby,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Sun Also Rises”—all those great American novels that shape our high school literature curricula.
I’m old school. I’m anti-establishment. Hell, I may even be blasphemous, but I can’t keep quiet any longer.
It’s that time of year again. Men, dust off your suits. Ladies, pull out those conservative blouses and hey, button up all the buttons. It’s time to put on your networking shoes and print off some extra resumes because, that’s right, it’s job-hunting time!
A man walks into a bar.... Ouch.
I hate to end the semester on a negative note, but I have a formal complaint. As someone who takes the majority of her classes on East Campus, it’s something I’ve noticed time and again and I must speak my truth. That’s right freshmen, I’m talking to you.
Never have I ever climbed to the top of the Duke Chapel, burrowed through the East Campus tunnels or camped out in K-ville with 11 of my closest Crazies.
Ah, spring! You’ve come late this year, but no matter, we all graciously welcome your return. The Durham sky seems bluer, the sun shines brighter and the grass on Main Quad is gree-…. Well, it’s being replanted.
Whenever I start to question the morality of Duke-kind, I think back to my time on crutches.
Ever wondered why French women don’t get fat?
“So, can I bing you?” Although this may seem like a completely moronic question to my fellow technologically savvy—and dare I say addicted—members of Generation Y, I in fact know a man who asked me this very question. We’ll call him Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is a friend of my parents and a man born during the height of the Baby Boom. I admit it, I laughed at Mr. Smith as he struggled to understand all the features of his new Blackberry Storm. Bing, pin numbers and brick breaker were several of the applications I planned on teaching Mr. Smith, but his naïveté had caught me off guard. “No, you cannot bing me,” I told him. “You can ping me. There’s a difference. In fact, the two aren’t even related. Bing is an advanced search engine for your phone but to ping someone makes his blackberry vibrate when he isn’t responding to your BBM. Bing is a thing and ping makes a ding.” The blank expression on Mr. Smith’s face said it all. My simple rhyme had made no sense to him. He was a product of a generation whose identity came from the rejection and redefinition of the cultural values set by the generation before him. He grew up with Rock-N-Roll, Civil Rights and the first walk on the moon. He listened to a transistor radio during adolescence, used an ATM for the first time in 1969 and never dreamed in a million years that as an adult, he would own a portable telephone with a touch screen. He is a Baby Boomer and I am a Millennial, born during the “Echo Boom” of 1982-1995. Like our parents, we too are a culturally liberal generation. We, however, place more emphasis on expression and acceptance, hence the popularity of emoticons, Facebook friends and “liking” said friends’ statuses. Sociologists believe that because of our similar numbers and ideologies, Baby Boomers and Millennials (your parents and you) better relate to one another than Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation (your parents and your grandparents). I, however, disagree on one front: technology. I had just effortlessly defined minute details of the Blackberry, a multi-purpose miniature computer that never leaves my side. It houses my phonebook, my e-mails, my to-do lists and even a handful of my favorite photos. I was clear in my explanations, but it was as if Mr. Smith and I spoke different languages. My techy vocab had surpassed his realm of comprehension. He was lost and I realized this vast generation gap. We know our Blackberries, our iPhones and our iPods like the back of our hands. Much of our days are spent ferociously texting, BBM-ing and surfing the web for the latest scores. We know the ins and outs of Facebook, YouTube and iTunes. If our iPods aren’t in our ears, they’re charging in our computers. As our generation has grown, so has communication technology and as a result, we adapt naturally to technology’s changes. That is why, for instance, it took me no time at all to adapt from my Verizon SLVR phone to the Blackberry, from dial-up Internet to Wi-Fi, from CDs to the third generation iPod Touch. Just last week, a professor of mine handed out hard copies of an e-mail he wanted the class to read. Yes, he could just have easily forwarded the email to the class, saving both paper and time. However, he is a Boomer. Technology is very much a part of his everyday life in the 21st century and studies show that Boomers now spend more time online than watching TV, but because he did not learn from an early age, Internet operations that seem so obvious to us did not to him. While I realize there are exceptions on both fronts—that friend who is an incompetent texter or that dad who invented an iPod App—collectively, we’re a generation whose desire to be “peer-oriented” has made us the most connected and best-informed cohort of individuals the planet has ever seen. We expect information to be instantaneous, high-speed. Ninety-seven percent of today’s college students own a computer, 94 percent own a cell phone and 56 percent own an MP3 player, according to a 2007 survey conducted by The BACCHUS Network. My point here is simple. Although we are a generation that is comparable to our parents’ when it comes to college experience, careers paths and a love for music, the technology gap most greatly differentiates Millennials and the Boomers. Why else would all the people who make appointments at the Genius Bar of the Apple store be north of 40? Molly Lester is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Friday.
Country singer Alan Jackson claims that where he comes from, it’s “cornbread and chicken.” Well, Mr. Jackson and I don’t come from too far apart.