millennials

In my post about my School of Business celebration, I complained about the speaker, Marcia Bullard, calling us graduates “millennials.” Will and I were both under the impression that the generational label of “millennial” applied to a younger subset of the population – namely the undergrads – anyone currently between like 15 and 25.  When we told others about it, they agreed having heard such labels as “Generation Y” and “Echo Boomers.”

After writing the post and publishing it, I went back to add a link to the term (because I like to add links to posts to further the understanding of a concept or some such nonsense – actually I just like having lots of links).

With a simple search of Wikipedia, I discovered that I was very wrong to be so quick to judge Ms. Bullard.

It turns out that there are several common nicknames given to the generation born between the late-1970s and the 2000s.

• Generation Y
• Generation Next
• Net Generation
• Millennials
• Echo Boomers

Generation Y refers to the simple fact that we follow Generation X chronologically.  Easy enough.  I think this one was popular before they really had a handle on how to define our generation.

According to Wikipedia (awesome source that it is, I know because I used to get mad at group members in grad school citing Wikipedia articles but this is just a blog), two authors - William Strauss and Neil Howe – used the term “Millennials” because the population it described had coined the term itself to differentiate themselves from GenX-ers.  They seem to have also coined the phrase “Generation Next” using it in the title of a book - Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.

I think the term “Net Generation” is fairly obvious.  We are the first generation to become truly proficient at and dependent on the “Net.”  It was all developed, made public and became ubiquitous by the time we were in college – or even high school if you were an early adopter.

The term “Echo Boomers” refers to the fact that many children of this generation are the children of baby boomers.  As such and regardless of the fact that many Boomers chose to have smaller families, there are a lot of us.  I actually don’t fit this moniker because my parents aren’t Boomers – they’re too old.

Anyway… this my long winded way of saying that I screwed up and I shouldn’t have judged so quickly and harshly.  And I thought it was kind of interesting to learn about.