The Millennials

At the dedication of the re-born Linderman Library in 2007, the guest speaker was librarian Dr. Richard Sweeney. A librarian addressing librarians; no surprise you say? Ah, but the librarian was not speaking of books or mortar or scholars or digital whatever but of the major market segment of an academic library, the students. In this instance, the current crop of students, all of whom belong to the “Millennial Generation,” roughly described as those born between 1979 and 1994.

I’ve been a librarian for a long time. I’ve always been in academia, either as a student myself or as a librarian. It didn’t take long to map out the annual cycle, from long lines at the bookstore through 4 o’clock quizzes, weekends that began on Thursday, and term papers begun in the last week of classes. And that’s the way it was until the late 1990’s.

The new pattern became obvious in the new Millennium. The Millennial student grew up in the digital age. Information is at your fingertips; no long hours in the Library stacks. Articles and books are increasingly digital; no need to stuff coins or a copycard into the copier. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it’s easy to find the right picture to illustrate your point. For that matter, you can find exactly how to calibrate your lab equipment with a nice video in YouTube, so who needs the manual?

Meanwhile, back at the Library, the end of semester term paper rush dissipated. No, it didn’t disappear, it just regressed to earlier in the semester. The cycle changed from peaks in November and April to a pretty steady roar all year. Not only wasn’t there a peak at the end, but there weren’t many troughs, either.

So, all of us (faculty, librarians, advisors, etc.) should be ecstatic, right? Undergraduates are seeking new sources, managing their time, addressing problems in novel ways. They are engaged. They are active learners. And they spend a lot of class time reading their email, sharing tweets, working on homework assignments for other courses…  And one other thing: they don’t “read.”

Back to Richard Sweeney. Over a number of years, he’s researched the Millennial Student. (Part of this was self-defense; he has children that are Millennials.) The major patterns that have emerged are interactive learners, convenience oriented, impatient, expect personalization, results oriented, multitaskers, collaborators, and believers in a balanced life style.  Sweeney gathers much of his information live using focus groups. I attended one in 2008, sponsored by the Engineering Librarians Division of the American Society for Engineering Education. This was the first time that Sweeney had interviewed an “all engineer” panel. An SRO crowd watched while he interviewed 12 engineering students (6 men, 6 women; undergraduates and graduate; different majors; multiple races; all “US educated”). The students, who only knew that they were part of a panel discussion, answered a series a questions and their responses almost exactly matched the “profile” that Millennials exhibit.

Except for one category: reading. When asked if they had read anything not related to course assignments in the last year, all of them repsponded “yes.” When asked specifically what they read, many indicated that they had read several novels, newspapers, non-fiction outside of engineering, and had done so several times during the year. At the end of the session, Dr. Sweeney said that, in the average group he had interviewed over the years, only one or two students had read anything non-course related.

And you thought engineers were the nerds.

So, you Millennials out there: what have you read recently? And you non-Millennials? And does it count if your “reading” is an audio book in your iPod?