What you should know about this year's freshers

---

Many freshers entering Sussex this autumn were born in 1981 - the year the Social Democratic Party was formed. In the USA, that was the year President Reagan took office.

Beloit College, a small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, has for the second year released what it calls a "mindset list". "Each generation", says the college, "has its particular set of cultural icons and touchstones that are critical to its identity. Today however, the gap in understanding between generations increases dramatically as TV, films, vocabulary and technology adjust the way we perceive and express ideas at an increasingly rapid rate."

The college has therefore assembled a "list of ways in which entering first year students differ in their frame of reference, not only from the teachers and advisors, but from those just a few years older than themselves". At Sussex, of course, this last category includes many first-year students.

The Beloit "Class of 2003 mindset list" includes the following suggestions from its students and staff.

• They are the first generation to be born into Huggies and Pampers.
• They were born and grew up with Microsoft, IBM PCs, in-line skates, fax machines and great quantities of commercial interruptions on television.
• They don't think there is anything terribly futuristic about 2001 and were never concerned about 1984.
• They have probably never dialled a 'phone.
• They never knew Madonna when she was like a virgin.
• John Lennon has always been dead.
• The moonwalk is a Michael Jackson dance step, not a Neil Armstrong giant step.
• The term "adult" has increasingly come to mean "dirty".
• They don't understand why Solidarity is spelt with a capital "S".
• They have never seen white smoke over the Vatican and do not know its significance.
• Women have always been travelling into space.
• Yugoslavia has never existed.

In an attempt to bridge the generation gap at Sussex, we welcome your suggestions for a Sussex "1999 entry mindset list". Please send your ideas by Friday 15 October to the Information Office, 230 Sussex House. Ext. 8888 or email internalcomms@sussex.ac.uk.