The Beloit Mindset List for the Class of 2021 is Here and We Officially Feel Old

Who wants to take a trip down memory lane for second...or two?

The year is 1999. What was happening in your life that year? How old were you? I was 20, raising a two year old and lived in low income housing in Edina, Minnesota. I spent most of my free time playing "Snake" on my Nokia candy bar phone, would spend hours waiting for dial up to connect to the internet just so I could sit on AIM and talk to complete strangers in even stranger chat rooms; and I have no photographic evidence of all the shenanigans I got into with my friends because we used disposable cameras, lost half of them and didn't have a place like Facebook to share it all.

Those were the good old days, days someone who's now a freshman in college will never get to experience. They were too busy being born.

But, now that they're all grown, it's time to send them off into the world so they can have the same fun experiences and make the same mistakes we did when we were 18.

Here's just a list of some of the things that set them apart from the rest of us, according to the annual Beloit College Mindset List:

1. They are the first generation for whom a “phone” has been primarily a video game, direction finder, electronic telegraph, and research library.
2. They have largely grown up in a floppy-less world.
3. Donald Trump has always been a political figure, as a Democrat, an Independent, and a Republican.
4. In their lifetimes, Blackberry has gone from being a wild fruit to being a communications device to becoming a wild fruit again.
5. They have always been searching for Pokemon.
6. Dora the Explorer and her pet monkey Boots helped to set them on the course of discovery.
7. By the time they entered school, laptops were outselling desktops.
8. Whatever the subject, there’s always been a blog for it.
9. A movie scene longer than two minutes has always seemed like an eternity.
10. Ketchup has always come in green.
11. Men have always shared a romantic smooch on television.
12. Bill Clinton has always been Hillary Clinton’s aging husband.
13. Barbie and American Girl have always been sisters at Mattel.
14. There have always been emojis to cheer us up.
15. Justin Timberlake has always been a solo act.

See the entire list, there are 60, here.