Every time I watch a confirmation hearing or hear talk of a stimulus plan or find out about yet another inauguration to-do, I can’t help but think about how much work there actually is to do.

This, I’m told, is a very Gen Y impulse, the product of being young, sleep-deprived, and raised on Mr. Rogers, who told us we really could do whatever we liked. But I think it probably has more to do with getting older, and coming to grips with what exactly our future might hold. Sure, we’ve got the Wii, and HDTV, and Google, but those only go so far when you’re unemployed, drowning in debt and lamenting the plight of the polar bear.

It’s a topsy-turvy world out there, and while every generation has experienced some of that, the real grown-ups in my life say that feeling does seem more pervasive than ever, reaching into just about every aspect of life – from foreign policy to the domestic struggles of young vets, from student loans to the greatest economic instability since the Depression, from joblessness at home to the perils (human rights, environmental and otherwise) of globalization abroad. Or maybe we just hear about it more.

Regardless, I know this worldview might appear a tad extreme, so in the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d give you a little insight into what I saw and heard this week to put me in such a lovely frame of mind - a small snapshot of one Y perspective.

5 signs of the apocalypse, and why they made me think of you…

1. Gold might as well be fur. Last night, I told my boyfriend I’m off gold. I’m not that flash to begin with – and I’ve been off diamonds for a while for obvious reasons – but after reading National Geographic’s January cover story, “Gold: The True Cost of a Global Obsession,” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t already known to eschew gold. “For all of its allure, gold’s human and environmental toll has never been so steep,” author Brook Larmer writes. At this rate, I’m going to have to take up an ascetic lifestyle. I already had to stop eating shrimp. My sister’s even done with Coca-Cola. And if anyone ever marries me, it’ll probably be without a ring (and not because I’m easygoing). It’s easy to dismiss as a whole lot of fanatacism, but with the amount and visibility of information that’s out there, we’re going to learn some things we don’t like. Ignoring them won’t make them go away. On the contrary, we should be grateful we do know, and doing our best to act on that knowledge when we can.
2. Everyone owes $50k! According to a financial aid counselor at a well-known Washington, D.C., university who my siblings chatted up last week, $50,000 to $60,000 in educational debt from undergrad is just about expected these days for her institution and schools of its caliber. There’s so much to say about that, and yet, no need to say anything at all. Because, as the College Board says, educational debt is an investment in your future, and a bachelor’s degree is all but essential these days just to be competitive (someone with a B.A. will earn $800,000 more than someone with a high school diploma over a lifetime), so young people hardly have a choice. But that doesn’t make it any less shameful.
3. Kids use Facebook for (not annoying) good. Believe it or not, and whatever you might think of the situation in the Middle East, I found the following rather encouraging: The 14-year-old daughter of close family friends recently updated her Facebook status – which people use to say everything from “Joey is ‘eating spaghetti,’” to, “Sarah is ’so, so, so excited to be engaged!’” – to read, “R. is ‘702 Palestinians murdered by Israel in Gaza (more than 230 children & 100 women) & 3100 injured. Donate your status.’” Now this is a little girl I’ve known since she was a baby, and whose young adulthood I’m so in denial about that I assiduously avoid her Facebook page, lest I find anything I don’t want to know. And Facebook is running out of ways to surprise me. But unlike the 101 groups for this or that cause, or messages from people actively proselytizing, this just had an earnest, honest, youthful sincerity to it that grabbed me. And  how nice to find that on Facebook.
   
4. The government hates animals. New York’s Governor David A. Patterson has proposed “an immediate 55 percent cut and elimination of zoo and botanical garden funds altogether in 2010,” writes Andrew C. Revkin on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog. All right, I get it — the state’s in trouble, and the $5 million it’ll save by slashing the zoo’s funding will no doubt go a long way in stabilizing things. Doom a hedgehog, feed an investment banker, and all that. But really, how sad. It isn’t enough that we’re destroying natural habitats all over the world, now we have to target the artificial ones we’ve created to shelter the few animals who might survive us. What difference does it make if my kids never get to see a red panda or Bengal tiger? (Never mind the American pika, a cute-as-a-button rabbit relative that’s on its way to becoming the second animal to join the endangered species list because of global warming, behind the polar bear. NatGeo can be such a downer.) Sheesh. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s pithy but pointed video response to the budget cuts is perfect. I hope someone listens.
5. And I love my Mom, but what about the elderly? And in what could have been my own personal apocalypse, on New Year’s Eve, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And last week, she had surgery to remove it. It’ll be a few months of recovery ahead, but the way she handled it – bouncing right back better and bossier than ever – reminded me of that Boomer resilience that some say (and I hope) we’ve inherited. But it also underscored how important excellent health care is: While watching doctors dote on my mom was a relief, I couldn’t help but think about all the people who don’t have that, not just all over the world, but right here at home. And while nine million uninsured children is a disgrace, our aging population will be larger than ever in the coming years – because of both the number of Boomers, and their lengthening life span – and adequate health care will be essential for them. Not meeting those needs would be a disgrace, too.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about, guys. What does it all mean? I don’t know yet, except that there’s a long road of recovery and rebuilding ahead for us, too. Have I fallen off the maudlin cliff, or do you feel it, too?

So it’s a new year, and in the interest of all of us getting/staying employed in 2009, I thought I’d share some news about a recent beta launch that promises to help. It’s called Gotta Mentor, and yes, it is a social networking tool of sorts. Given my very public paranoia about how hokily-titled networking sites are diluting our real connections, you can imagine my skepticism. But where Facebook and MySpace are more or less for keeping up with friends, and LinkedIn is a sort of professional contacts list, Gotta Mentor is about engaging a small group of individuals who are focused exclusively on assisting you in developing your career, according to president and co-founder Ronald Mitchell.

Technology’s already been at work in the mentoring world, but as any mentee who’s suffered through a chemistry-free mentoring lunch can tell you, it’s mostly been to create huge databases of random facts that are about as good for matching people as personals ads. And that tends to make structured mentoring programs hugely unsatisfying. So it’s no surprise that the question Mitchell gets most is, “Why would people want to mentor?”

“The answer is simple,” he says. “Most people already do mentor. We believe that people want to give guidance and support to others. They just don’t want to give it to everyone. They want to invest their time in people they have an affinity with.” So in addition to facilitating mentoring relationships for people who already know each other, Gotta Mentor’s MentorMatch makes it easy to find a match based on what you already share—whether it’s family, college, a sorority, a sport, ethnicity, gender, employer, or all of the above.

Professionals from finance, consulting, marketing, education and other areas are already signed up, along with students from such schools as Yale, Harvard Business School, and the University of Pennsylvania. (The service is open to people at all levels, though.) And while their common experiences are great for engagement, Gotta Mentor doesn’t rely on that alone. In addition to resources such as personalized career coaching and searchable career development advice, Gotta Mentor formalizes its mentoring relationships: Mentors agree to a timeline, and advisees must share their career goals and expectations just to be connected. “We would rather you engage five people more substantively around your career than connect to 500,” Mitchell says.

To be frank, I’ll have to see it to believe it. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t state the obvious: The best mentors are the people who teach you over a lifetime of talking, thinking, and living, not necessarily the ones who give you a killer online resume review. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for Gotta Mentor’s brand of career guidance, too, or that relationships built in this sort of online community can’t translate elsewhere.

And streamlining the less organic parts of the mentoring experience certainly has its appeal, especially considering how embarrassing it can be for all parties concerned when someone levels the dreaded, “Will you be my mentor?” So I’m willing to give Gotta Mentor the benefit of the doubt. Because it just might work — and because I learned my lesson a few years ago: I had a similarly suspicious initial reaction to fellow Gotta Mentor co-founder John Rice’s education nonprofit, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, when I wrote about it in 2006. At first look, MLT — which aimed to get more diverse students into top MBA programs and beyond—seemed like yet another well-intentioned, but far too optimistic organization. But by the time I’d finished meeting some of its obsessed staffers, gushing Fortune 500 sponsors, and actual students who were now headed to Top 10 schools — it was clear Rice had proved me wrong. Just in case he’s done it again, give Gotta Mentor a look — and as always, let us know what you think.

When I saw a headline about this study, “The Lengthening of Childhood,” on the front page of the New York Suna few days ago, my Gen Y antennae immediately went up. As we’ve discussed here before, some researchers argue that one of the main reasons we Yers are who we are is our own (Boomer parent-enabled) elongated adolescence. But instead of the more general argument about young people’s dependence on their parents, this National Bureau of Economic Research working paper focused specifically on kindergartners and the potentially negative effects of “red-shirting” — essentially, the increasingly popular practice of starting those with fall and winter birthdays a year later so that they’ll be at the older end of their class, instead of among the youngest. And since some of us are young enough to have been affected by this trend, and others may soon have children of their own and be facing this decision themselves, it seemed worth discussing — especially because of the interesting role our parents play.

Red-shirting isn’t new, and it’s been on the rise. Supported by past research as a means to better-performing and more well-adjusted students, the strategy started to catch on with parents, and many school districts began to move their kindergarten eligibility cutoff dates up as well, so that those kids with birthdays later in the year would become the elder statesmen of their primary schools, instead of the runts, for lack of a better word.

But according to the paper (written by Harvard researchers): “There is little evidence that being older than your classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ, earnings, or educational attainment. By contrast, there is substantial evidence that entering school later reduces educational attainment (by increasing high-school dropout rates) and depresses lifetime earnings (by delaying entry into the labor market).”

Of course, there are all sorts of circumstances here, and some children may very well need the extra time, but the most striking part of all this to me wasn’t whether or not red-shirting ought to be standard operating procedure, but the apparently significant influence of, as the Sun politely calls them, “ambitious parents.”

“Upper-income, white, highly-educated parents red-shirt their children at the highest rate,” the paper says. And later: “Parents believe that older children out-compete their younger peers in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in college admissions. Thus, eager to give their children an edge, parents are willing to hold back their child one year in order to shift them up the pecking order.”

Hello, helicopter parenting! While the researchers are careful not to blame parents, it’s clear that in some cases, these admittedly well-intentioned moms and dads end up serving their egos far more than their children’s actual interests. And while in the short term, they’re doing it to have a happy child and be happy themselves — as George Davison, headmaster of Grace Church School in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, puts it in the Sun, “People in the world who feel good about themselves are more effective adults, and more effective adults have higher income.” — even all those good feelings could be to their detriment. Because while experts agree that kindergarten’s harder than it’s traditionally been, and more is expected of the kids than ever, that isn’t an excuse to gloss over the other crucial lessons that childhood is supposed to teach.

Learning, earning, growth, development — those are better rewards than empty praise. A child who’s always protected from making mistakes and experiencing failure is going to be at a major disadvantage in the “real” world. Because let’s be honest, that’s what build character and keeps us from being the coddled adults everyone says we are. And without it, you have the kind of young person who’s just sure he’s the answer to whatever the question is — you know, the one all those managers and older people are always complaining about in our comments? It’s an attitude that, frankly, often also leads to less true achievement, not more; it’s hard to strive when you haven’t ever really had to, or to fight to earn something that you believe you already deserve.

Please don’t mistake this for some kind of anti-Gen Y rant. If anything, it’s in defense of Yers: It frustrates me when we take the rap for the consequences of decisions out of our control — i.e. when we’re vilified for simply being the people our parents raised us to be. (Which isn’t to excuse bad behavior, but rather to recognize what one might call “shared culpability.”)

And I am definitely not saying that there aren’t many situations where red-shirting is right and appropriate, depending on the individual child. But it seems to me there are also many situations where our moms and dads just need to suck it up and send us off into the big, bad world. If the six-year-olds I know are any indication, it’s the parents who are afraid, not the kids. (Seriously. Have you listened to a nursery rhyme lately? Anyone who can listen to “Rock-a-bye Baby” and still go to sleep has got to be pretty brave.) So the sooner Mom and Dad face those fears, I think, the better off they’ll be.

Now, what do you think? I’m out on a bit of a limb here, I know, but are you out here with me? Or are you all for starting school when the spirit moves you? Anyone have personal experience in this area? (For the record, only one of my sibs has an early birthday, putting him on the older end of his class. He was also by far the coolest of all of us at school. But I think that had more to do with his love of cars and clothes than any temporal advantage. Or maybe that was the temporal advantage. Who knows? But regardless, the rest of us seemed to have turned out all right…)

Check out my latest story for the magazine (and best excuse for going off the grid lately): “The making of a UPS driver.” It’s a look at young people at the other end of the Gen Y spectrum — those who aren’t necessarily wealthy and Ivy-educated with overindulgent parents — and what this 100-year-old company has found out about them. Oh, plus the $34 million, 11,500-square-foot, obstacle course-style facility UPS (UPS) has built to train — and hopefully, ultimately help retain — them. There’s a lot more I could say, but go ahead and give the story a glance; at the very least, it’ll be good fodder for us here. Besides, those of you who’ve found me completely annoying and are in the market for a little Schadenfreude should enjoy the opening. (Think: Nadira, UPS uniform, sweltering heat, eight-hour shift. Not my finest moment.) And as always, let us know your thoughts…

Last week, I spent some time out in Dayton, Ohio, speaking at the Executive Directors’ Conference of the National Association of Regional Councils about some of the challenges of recruiting and retaining Gen Yers. NARC is the umbrella group for metropolitan planning organizations and councils of government across the country — i.e., the people in charge of many aspects of urban planning, from transportation to environmental quality.

As cool as it was to appear in front of such a distinguished group, I have to tell you, I wasn’t expecting much. After all, local government and the industries around it aren’t exactly known for their staggering open-mindedness and willingness to change. Not to mention that this audience was our parents’ age. I’m glad to say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised, and extremely encouraged by everything these folks are doing to accommodate Yers. For instance, one gentleman shared how, in his office, every new hire’s first major project is a fundraiser for a major charity, which lets the young people try their hand at a big assignment, builds a great image for the organization, and allows lots of room for learning.

Many asked, though, how they could keep their Yers engaged — and frankly, coming to work — in the face of huge salaries from big corporations trying to poach them. The plans they work on have a huge impact on people’s lives, another attendee said, but is that enough for Yers? I’m inclined to say that, yes, along with lots of exposure to higher-ups’ passion, Yers will choose high-impact jobs like these over high-paying, but perhaps less rewarding, ones. (Leaving aside, of course, debt. The average college grad with loans has more than $19,000 to pay back, so s/he may have to choose salary in the short term.)

But I think the key is seeing the dedication of senior staffers. As psyched as these Boomers were about their work, I couldn’t imagine any Yer I know not finding it a little infectious. This seems to be borne out in the research, which Tamara Erickson — one of our recurring Gig experts and president of the Concours Institute — says shows that Yers value expertise above all else, including authority. Meaning that, a lot of the time, we’ll take the old guy with great stories and good advice over the younger one with a big title. So for those senior folks in the public sector or nonprofit world, retaining their Yers may just be a matter of sharing a few tales about the lives they’ve changed.

Then again, that may just be my own wishful thinking. Especially because, as a writer, I’m something of a sucker for all that touchy-feely stuff. I’d be curious to hear what you all think, though. How could one of these organizations keep you?

*****

On a related note, I and lots of the older people who write in about The Gig were encouraged by the great response to the activism post last week. But in light of that, I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t point you guys to this piece, “Narcissists in Neverland,” a “web exclusive” from Newsweek last week, the point of which, evidently, is to deride Yers for wanting to “pursue their passions” more than “make lots of money.” (Could be good for the NARC people…)

I’d hoped to avoid writing about this at all, mostly because — and I’m going to go out on a limb here — I found it a little ridiculous and more than a bit irresponsible. But who am I to deny you this kind of comedy? Among my favorite moments (aside from the fact that it uses an anecdote from organizational psychologist Mitchell Marks that appeared in Fortune’s Gen Y story six months ago — how exclusive is that?) was the following: Generation Me author Jean “Twenge has found that the gap between expectation and reality is immense for Generation Y. One example: in 1975, 24 percent of American high-school students believed that they would earn a graduate degree; today 50 percent of high-school students think the same thing. In reality just 9 percent of students both then and now actually go on to accomplish this goal.”

Shame on you people for hoping you’ll get an education! It’s not as if this were America or anything. Plus, young people may be more educated than ever before, but we’re actually going to need them to get more educated to do the jobs soon to be left vacant by experienced retiring Boomers. So keep dreaming, you crazy kids!

And then, there’s the blatant omission of the debt issue. Obviously young people are going home; you’d be going home too if you’d paid what we did for our degrees. And let’s be honest: That’s what our parents wanted us to do. Sure, there are the ne’er-do-wells, but there are also the going-to-do-wells. Supporting them now — even if they want to waste time doing, say, volunteer work — is an investment in the country’s future.

Just ask my own mom, who let me move home for six months after I graduated to see if I could make this whole magazine thing work. I’d venture to say she’d do it again, and barring any unforeseen degeneracy, I don’t have plans to empty her nest egg. And even our resident Boomer expert, Anne Fisher, has advised readers to follow their dreams in lieu of the big cash payoff in her column, so it isn’t just the indulgent moms of the world leading us up this garden path.

There’s so much more I could say, but I have a nice-person rep to maintain. So for the last word on this, visit the wonderful people at Gawker, who always succeed in saying precisely the things I would, if only my mom — narcissism-enabler that she is — didn’t read The Gig. What about you? Is this story unfair, or are we trying to live the impossible dream (and taking advantage of our parents in the process)?

This month, a conversation with someone who’s actually making a difference in a lot of young lives. (Though maybe not in the way you’d think!) Hope this interests some of you GMAT-takers, GMAT-contemplaters, and GMAT-haters. And if you want to share your own tales of GMAT woe and triumph, we’d love to hear them. Have a great weekend!

*****

When I first heard of Bara Sapir, she had the unenviable task of getting my sister hyped about the LSAT. When I first realized how good Bara Sapir was, she had talked my sister out of law school altogether. Sounds strange — especially considering that Sapir’s tutored hundreds of young people for the LSAT, GMAT, and other major standardized tests with great results — but Sapir isn’t exactly traditional. The founder of Test Prep New York and creater of the Full Potential audio test-prep series doesn’t go in for the standard self-flaggellation. In fact, her holistic methods focus as much on personal wellness — through techniques such as hypnosis, guided visualization, and “neuro-linguistic programming” (i.e., changing your vocabulary to effect a change in your performance) — as test questions. And with B-school becoming a hot topic for many of us as we shake off the summer, I thought some of you might like to hear from her about the GMAT. (Just because those hedge fund guys from that New York Times story last weekend don’t care about MBAs anymore doesn’t mean we don’t, right?)

If you’re laughing, I hear you. Normally, I might be inclined to call this New Age tomfoolery, too. But it’s hard not to think differently once you start hearing Sapir’s stories.

The second installment of our first-year stories, this time from a young woman who spent the first full-time year of her teaching career in an urban charter school. I knew her years ago, when we were both starry-eyed students, so it’s a big (but wonderful) leap to think of her with students of her own. Names have been changed, of course, but it’s a story worth reading if you’ve ever thought about this particular calling. And even if you haven’t. Have a great weekend, and keep these coming.

—–

I got my first full-time teaching job in November, which should have been the first warning sign. I figured the mid-semester opening meant that the Fates approved of my sudden departure from graduate school. It didn’t occur to me to ask what had happened to the presumably minor character who had taught those classes in September and October.

The actual first warning sign was the multi-page printout taped to the wall of the main hallway. It listed every student’s name followed by a series of numbers — 3, 8, 11, 32. Merits and demerits, weekly and cumulative. The principal explained, with real pride, that discipline in his school was organized. In each classroom, he had posted a detailed inventory of possible behaviors and their point values, positive or negative; teachers received a tally sheet for keeping score during each period, like baseball statisticians. Too many demerits meant detention, a call home, or suspension. Even worse penalties — a second or third year in the seventh grade — awaited those who didn’t pass a series of monthly skills tests.

The idea was that if the kids knew the consequences of their actions, they’d naturally act more wisely — which, according to the behavior list, mostly meant be quiet, do the work, pass the tests. And if my kids could have done those things, they would have. But more than half of the seventh graders in my remedial math class had learning disabilities or emotional disorders or both, plus more than their fair share of family problems, plus seven years in some of the most chaotic and ineffective classrooms in this country, plus two months of doing more or less nothing during the periods that were now mine. Plus me, and in those early months, all I knew how to do was keep score.

My kids knew math the way a Guantanamo detainee might know English: in odd chunks and fragments, largely misunderstood, deployed for mere survival. (Two weeks into a unit on multiplying fractions: “Wait… 2 1/2, that’s two times a half, that’s one, right?”) From their perspective, passing the tests was impossible; avoiding suspensions seemed less necessary than avoiding the humiliation of doing math they didn’t understand and the boredom of watching other people do math they didn’t understand. They put their heads down and slept; they slid out of their chairs to crawl on the floor; they banged softly on their desks, in rhythm with one another, a not-half-bad improvised percussion section. I was thrilled, in December, when a sometimes-belligerent young man suddenly sat tall in his chair, looked me in the eye, and stretched up his hand, just like in the teacher-recruitment posters. Finally, something had clicked for him, and he gestured eagerly when I called his name: “Miss, your boobs are HUGE!”

I gave him three demerits.

The second installment of our first-year stories, this time from a young woman who spent the first full-time year of her teaching career in an urban charter school. I knew her years ago, when we were both starry-eyed students, so it’s a big (but wonderful) leap to think of her with students of her own. Names have been changed, of course, but it’s a story worth reading if you’ve ever thought about this particular calling. And even if you haven’t. Have a great weekend, and keep these coming.

—–

I got my first full-time teaching job in November, which should have been the first warning sign. I figured the mid-semester opening meant that the Fates approved of my sudden departure from graduate school. It didn’t occur to me to ask what had happened to the presumably minor character who had taught those classes in September and October.

The actual first warning sign was the multi-page printout taped to the wall of the main hallway. It listed every student’s name followed by a series of numbers — 3, 8, 11, 32. Merits and demerits, weekly and cumulative. The principal explained, with real pride, that discipline in his school was organized. In each classroom, he had posted a detailed inventory of possible behaviors and their point values, positive or negative; teachers received a tally sheet for keeping score during each period, like baseball statisticians. Too many demerits meant detention, a call home, or suspension. Even worse penalties — a second or third year in the seventh grade — awaited those who didn’t pass a series of monthly skills tests.

The idea was that if the kids knew the consequences of their actions, they’d naturally act more wisely — which, according to the behavior list, mostly meant be quiet, do the work, pass the tests. And if my kids could have done those things, they would have. But more than half of the seventh graders in my remedial math class had learning disabilities or emotional disorders or both, plus more than their fair share of family problems, plus seven years in some of the most chaotic and ineffective classrooms in this country, plus two months of doing more or less nothing during the periods that were now mine. Plus me, and in those early months, all I knew how to do was keep score.

My kids knew math the way a Guantanamo detainee might know English: in odd chunks and fragments, largely misunderstood, deployed for mere survival. (Two weeks into a unit on multiplying fractions: “Wait… 2 1/2, that’s two times a half, that’s one, right?”) From their perspective, passing the tests was impossible; avoiding suspensions seemed less necessary than avoiding the humiliation of doing math they didn’t understand and the boredom of watching other people do math they didn’t understand. They put their heads down and slept; they slid out of their chairs to crawl on the floor; they banged softly on their desks, in rhythm with one another, a not-half-bad improvised percussion section. I was thrilled, in December, when a sometimes-belligerent young man suddenly sat tall in his chair, looked me in the eye, and stretched up his hand, just like in the teacher-recruitment posters. Finally, something had clicked for him, and he gestured eagerly when I called his name: “Miss, your boobs are HUGE!”

I gave him three demerits.

If there’s one thing twentysomethings these days aren’t interested in doing, it’s spending an entire career at one company. Many of us aren’t even willing to spend our careers reporting to other people, whatever the company. Which explains all the talk about entrepreneurship. Get together a few ambitious twentysomething corporate Americans, and it won’t be long before somebody steers the conversation toward the side hustle. Seems like everybody’s got one, and these risky fledgling (and sometimes ill-fated) projects are often what really keep young businesspeople going in the face of the daily grind.

That’s why when I first heard about Clark University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, I thought it might be worth some exploring on The Gig. And talking to George Gendron, former editor of Inc. magazine and founder and director of the I&E program, underscored how central entrepreneurship has become. “When I was at Inc. in the early ’80s, the skills of entrepreneurship were associated with small subsets of the population—engineers in Silicon Valley, say—and now those skills are vital life-skills for everybody,” he told me.

But the academic community hasn’t exactly heeded the call. (Despite the fact that the number of new small businesses is on the rise, with 671,800 opening doors in 2005, compared with just 585,140 in 2001.) So in 2004, Gendron created the I&E program at Clark, which lets students in any major add the entrepreneurship curriculum as a minor with an eye toward starting their own businesses as a capstone project. Not only does it serve those people who’ve got great corporate jobs and want more, it also helps more footloose types (people like me!) cobble a sustainable life out of their artistic leanings.

“This is a generation whose parents told them ‘follow your passion,’” Gendron says, “but once you do, what do you actually do with it? Entrepreneurship helps answer that question, because you can marry it to theater arts or art history or whatever you’re interested in, so that ten years from now you’re doing something in that arena, not just selling financial services.”

This month, the program graduated its first class, which included Aaron O’Hearn. The 21-year-old – who calls Gendron “one of the more influential and life-changing people I’ve met” – started out as the sort of guy who took AP Art classes and frowned on would-be corporate titans. But after taking his first I&E class, he was hooked. He founded Clark’s student entrepreneurship group, Initial Advantage, in 2004, and launched the group’s first student business – Campus Book Brokerage, which raised $10,000 from student investors and ended operations after returning a 4.5% profit – with three other members the same year. Today, IA has 30 members and provides everything from mentoring to marketing services for student entrepreneurs. The group’s waiting on 501(c)3 status and plans to create a seed fund for student initiatives.