This is my last column as an opinion columnist for the Indiana Daily Student, and after 3 1/2 years it’s a little more than surreal.
I was anxious when I came to IU. I knew very few people, I wasn’t confident with the major I’d chosen and I couldn’t see where I was going.
Since then, I’ve been abroad, developed some amazing friends and feel that I’ve set myself up for a creative future that I can’t wait to start.
Moreover, I developed a keen appreciation for this generation, my generation. Students here on this campus, and on other campuses, care deeply. Within the last few years we have staged marches, demanded transparency and begun movements for social and political change.
Yet we are told almost daily we are lazy, we don’t appreciate what we are given, we are glued to our phones and we are significantly dumber than the generations before us.
Of my group of friends, we all have nearly half, if not all, of our schooling paid for with scholarships that demand at least a 3.5 GPA. I’ve met few people here on campus who aren’t also working a separate job to help their parents pay for college.
Every semester I’m continually amazed and impressed by my fellow opinion columnists, old and new. Every single one — there are hundreds of them now — are deeply interested in social and political problems and the solutions to both.
I know people from my generation who have started businesses, traveled the world, fought for the environment, marched on Washington, worked with state and national governments and fought for their place in the digital age.
I feel sad writing this column. I feel that I am leaving behind a platform that helped me develop my voice and taught me about the world.
But if I leave with anything, it’s the knowledge that we millennials are an impressive and powerful group. We can, and we are, changing the world. And if I’ve learned anything at IU, it’s that the world we leave behind will be infinitely better than the one left for us.
So I encourage the students on this campus to keep raising their voices. And for the love of God, use the technology we keep getting condemned for. It was invented for a reason.
We are too many to be ignored, and we see the solutions to problems that have stumped people for years. We can fight for a place and we can give people who never had a voice megaphones from which to shout.
We can demand a new world because we deserve one.
ewenning@indiana.edu
@emmawenninger
