The mindset of incoming freshman

Every year Beloit College issues a mindset list to help professors relate to incoming freshman. Here are some of the highlights:

1. What Berlin wall?

Once Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany and the city of Berlin was divided by a literal wall. The infamous wall was one of the last and best-known symbols of the Cold War. The ideology that divided Germany crumbled as the Cold War played out and finally on November 9, 1989 East Germany announced that it would stop enforcing the boundary at the Berlin Wall. The German people on both side of the divide showed up in droves to tear down the wall by hand. Pieces of the Berlin wall ended up in places like museums and history departments, but perhaps the most interesting place to see pieces of the Berlin wall is in the men's restroom at the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where you can demonstrate your feelings about repressive communist regimes by urinating on a piece of history.

4. They never “rolled down” a car window.

This item has been subjected to much criticism on the Web already. First, this is an arbitrary and bizarre distinction to draw. Secondly, there are still cars manufactured with hand cranks for the windows. If you, like many students, didn't hop into a fresh-off-the-lot new car the second you got your driver's license, you probably have some experience with cars from past decades as well.

19. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.

Ay carumba! Unless you are a fictional cartoon character it is very unlikely you could have been classmates with "the" Bart Simpson. Even if you ignore the not so fine line between fiction and reality Bart's birthday is April 1, 1981.

32. They grew up in Wayne’s World.

Shyeah, right. If you are 18 this is probably news to you. Wayne's World was a popular Saturday Night Live sketch in the late eighties and early nineties about two metalheads who hosted a community access television show. With any luck you are only vaguely familiar with the phrases like "schwing," "blow chunks," and "...and monkeys might fly out of my butt." Should you wish to see what you were spared, Memorial Library has both Wayne's World movies on DVD. Party on!

44. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.

Some might argue that Twitter is the preferred method for real time autobiography, but I digress. Is there such a thing as Too Much Information anymore?

58. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.

The ever present debate over form vs. content. Is infotainment information or entertainment? Does adding comedy to news make it more digestible or simply trivialize serious matters? Don't forget that you can go beyond the sound byte by reading the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Wichita Eagle, Arkansas City Traveler, and Winfield Daily Courier at the library. (Not to mention all of our great databases.)

66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

E-mails, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blackboard... you probably spend half of your day using technology that would have seemed like science fiction to your parents when they were 18.

Do any of the items on this ring a bell. Dead on? Totally off? The Beloit Mindset List is a fascinating insight into what people of your professors' generation think of people of your generation.