By Abb Smith
If you’re graduating from U of L in December and entering the work force, good luck. Particularly if you are a member of Generation Y, take that good wish and multiply it by 100 – you’re going to need it. Hostility is going to hit you in the face.USA Today writer Stephanie Armour has described Generation Y – the group born after 1977 – as “young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office or listen to iPods at their desk.”A professor interviewed for Armour’s piece also added, “Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today’s work force. They’ve grown up questioning their parents, and now they’re questioning their employers. They don’t know how to shut up, which is great, but that’s aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now.'”But our generation is really no different than those that came before us. Our Baby Boomer parents were part of one of the most important eras in American history. They fought for change and reveled in questioning authority. Their battle for racial, economic and political equality may not have been fully realized, but the Boomers didn’t close their mouths the second they were told to shut up; tight lips don’t spawn revolutions. Thankfully we Gen Y apples haven’t fallen too far from those trees.At least our generation has a philosophy by which we’re trying to stick. Bruce Tulgan, a researcher with RainmakerThinking who was quoted in Armour’s article, stated that Generation Y is “like Generation X on steroids. They walk in with high expectations for themselves, their employer, their boss. If you thought you saw a clash when Generation X came into the workplace, that was the fake punch. The haymaker is coming now."But if being a “haymaker” means having across-the-board “high expectations” for myself and those around me, then call me what you will. People our age tend to be very independent thinkers, just like our parents and Gen X-ers. There’s nothing wrong with holding tightly to such a philosophy – even in stodgy and regressive workplaces. And so what if we have iTunes and iPods? And who cares if we have cell phones and still want our MTV? We’ll have plenty of time to become jaded, cynical, narrow-minded slaves to the status quo. Let us enjoy our freedom – and those guilty-pleasure episodes of “Laguna Beach” – while they last.
