Class of 2014 Mindset List

Hey guys! My name is Brady Eischeid, and I am a 2010 Hixson Scholar from Guthrie County! I am currently in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, majoring in agricultural education (teacher certification option).  I am also a member of section 1 of the Hixson Seminar class!

When first reading the introduction for the Beloit College Mindset List for the collegiate class of 2014, several ideas pop out at me. “With cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wristwatch” and “Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat” are the two that I definitely can determine “truth or myth.” The first statement is almost certainly a truth. Few young adults these days are ever caught with a watch; most will just use their cell phone or music player to determine the time. The other statement is for me a myth. This is mainly due to the fact that my mother can sometimes be a know-it-all history buff. As a result, I learned more than my fair share of American history in the mid-1900’s.

Once into the 75 fact list, I can just skim through the first several statements and just sort them into two categories: MAYBE and NO WAY. The very first one, “few…know how to write in cursive” is a MAYBE: even if we don’t like it, we all had to do it in third grade up until junior high. As for the second, that gets a big fat NO WAY: any Iowa State University student has received and sent “snail mail” alongside email. In addition, I happen to be 13 percent Czechoslovakian, so the statement “Czechoslovakia has never existed” is personally a clear-cut NO WAY.

I also noticed that a good chunk of the statements listed in the Mindset List are related to technology and young adults’ attitudes towards technology. Examples like “viewer discretion” for television warnings, computers’ CD-ROM disk drives, car manufacturers, and the computer HAL show the trend of innovative machinery and how our generation is much more dependent on it than that of our parents and grandparents. The next biggest categories of statements and topics appear to be people, historical events, music, products, and economy.

The Beloit College Mindset List is, overall, a very good insight to what a large portion of students my age are thinking about the history, technology, economy, and culture of the world. It definitely puts into perspective about how much perception can change from generation to generation. This has been my first blog as a Hixson Scholar, and I hoped you enjoyed it! Thanks!