After reading Laura Session Stepp’s excerpt from the book Unhooked and Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year, we see several differences and similarities between the two authors’ opinions of American college culture. One main difference between these two texts is the way the authors view today’s generation of freshman students. Stepp describes our generation as “team oriented, achievement driven, and polite” (20). On the other hand, Nathan describes college freshman with characteristics of “Individualism” and “independence” when it came to relationships between students, involvement on campus, and future ambitions.
A similarity between the two texts is the way in which each author views the interactions between students and their parents. When Nathan conducted interviews of foreign exchange students, one of her questions was about American students’ contact with their parents weekly. A Mexican exchange student observed that her American peers didn’t talk to their parents as much as she did per week: “My roommates call their dads and moms maybe once a week, and that’s it. It would be different if they were Mexican” (73). This observation of American students furthers Nathan’s conclusion that they are individualistic. Stepp echoes this concept by saying if parents were more involved in their college-aged children; those children would “drink less often, start dating later, and begin sex later” (45). As American college freshman, we agree with these observations; if parents were more connected to their adult children, then the morals of those children might align closer to those of their parents.
In addition to characteristics of American culture and the relationships between students and their parents, another interesting aspect is the influence of the media in college students’ lives. Nathan analyzed this media influence mainly by recording images and decorations on the fronts of students’ dorm room doors. The images seen on the doors were consistently images of “TV or film celebrities, models from ads, and anonymous sexy young men and women” (26). The media heavily influenced what students chose to post on the front of their own personal space that was open for the dorm to see. Nathan continues saying “the images of ‘real’ people—that is, photographs of the resident and people the resident knew—appeared on several doors, though less frequently than media images” (26). The media directly influences students according to Stepp, also: “Sexuality and sex have been part of the media sea in which kids have been swimming since 1970s, and the amount of sexual imagery has undeniably increased” (48).
The media plays a dominant role in shaping students perceptions of what is normal and what is not. This idea directly relates to the television shows that are popular in our day today, mainly those shown on MTV, for example Skins, Teen Mom, 16 and Pregnant, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and The Hard Times of R.J. Berger. All of these shows are highly sexual and promote somewhat irresponsible lifestyles, such as girls getting pregnant at the age of sixteen (16 and Pregnant) or a group of friends in high school binge drinking every weekend (Skins). We feel that we are affected by the media through these shows; if drinking, partying, and sexual behaviors are broadcasted on television, we feel that those activities have become the social norm for our generations, and we feel disconnected from our peers if we are not participating in these activities.
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