Student life these days isn’t what it used to be, and some might say technology is to thank (or blame) for a lot of these changes. A recent poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid asked Canadians to choose which of the following things they would be willing to give up: sex, alcohol, coffee, phones, televisions, automobiles, or the Internet. Two per cent of Canadians chose the Internet. Six percent chose sex.
Yet the differences between undergraduate life today and twenty or forty years ago extend beyond the Internet.
Scott Douglas, Dupage College ‘75
Rebecca Ghent, Randolph College ‘93
1 ) Research & Coursework
SD: Probably the greatest difference for students would be gathering information for reports. I don’t think you guys would be capable of doing it the way we had to do it back then. If there was something you wanted to know about, you’d have to go to the library and hope to find information about it. And unlike today it wasn’t as likely that you’d find it. If it wasn’t there, you’d go to the phonebook and start there.
RG: At first, [we composed reports] using typewriters in the writing lab or by hand. But towards the end, we’d write things on the computer. It was pre-Windows though, so we’d use old Macs or DOS programs.
2 ) News
SD: The absolute bottom line for information beyond any question was newspapers, that’s for sure … News took days! In politics, if someone said something about another guy, you wouldn’t hear about it that day. The only way a reporter would hear about it is if someone called them to tell them. There was the occasional nationwide broadcast of something.
RG: TV, to some degree, and newspapers — but I think most of us were pretty unaware of what was going on in the world.
Technology at School
3 ) Music
SD: The music scene was awesome, much better than now. Music came on records, of course, but the big thing was bootleg. We used to listen to terrible recordings, I don’t know how people made it. There was top 40, you know, Monkees or Beatles. There was no rock radio. Everything big was underground. I didn’t hear my first Zeppelin or Hendrix on the radio. I heard it on the underground. People would get together and rent just a few hours of time on an off-band radio station.
RG: Dave Matthews was still a college or frat band when I was in school; we heard lots of bands like that live at college mixers. We also had a lot of acoustic acts come to campus and play small shows.
4 ) Technology at School
SD: The first HP 35 was released in 1972. It had no programmable steps. It was mostly used by university engineering students.
Q: Did it have any graphing functions?
A: [laughs] No, no, no. It had a single line of characters but could represent exponents.
Q: How much did it cost?
A: About $300.
Q: Give me an example of something you might have bought for $300 at that time.
A: A car.
Q: What kind of car?
A: I don’t know. A 10- or 15-year-old sedan. Maybe a ’57 Chevy.
RG: I was a physics major, so I used a lot more equipment than most people probably did. I did a senior thesis on a computational physics problem, so I had a computer scrolling green numbers up a black screen in my dorm room; my friends used to come in and gawk at it and walk away shaking their heads.
5 ) Free Time
SD: Cards, dice, sports. And of course board games.
Q: People really played Monopoly?
A: Of course.
One of the things that was pivotal for that time was MTV (it might have been on cable, because that was new) but it was awesome. It would have been part of your conversation or your life in one way or another. At the time, what MTV was, was they just ran videos 24 hours a day with no commercials.
RG: I ran, played music, hiked, and spent a lot of time just hanging around with my friends, talking. We did a lot of talking, and some drinking and dancing.
I’m glad I wasn’t going to school 20 years ago because…
I’m glad I wasn’t going going to school 20 years ago because…
SD: Change. It seemed to us as though the previous generations were all the same, that ours was the first to be different.
RG: As a woman, I am constantly reflecting upon opportunities that I have that were unavailable to women in previous generations. This is particularly true in science; though there are still very few women in the physical sciences, the number is increasing all the time, and there are no fields that are formally closed to women.
