What Clothing says about a Student

     Youth style today reflects a much more informal and almost selfish attitude compared to the late 1960’s. The focus of youth style has changed considerably towards the informal over the decades as college attendance has become the norm or even forced by parents, something that is very clear with the style of dress of the 1960’s versus today.
     Youth today are very much more concerned with comfort, and informality in what they wear. What is very evident to me, particularly in the UMBC Skipjack yearbook, was that the only time that I saw anyone wear sneakers of any kind was while they were playing a sport. Any other photos of students in their day to day business they wore leather oxfords or dress shoes, something much more formal by our standards. For men, more formal footwear was accompanied by collared shirts, jackets, and often ties. Look around the campus today and you’d be surprised to find a more formal pair of shoes, much less a tie on anyone.
     As we’ve recently discussed in class, it’s now apparently socially acceptable to go to class in pajamas. This alone reflects a very different attitude towards how you present yourself at a university, students clearly don’t consider how they present themselves as important. In the photos in the yearbook, everyone appeared to be professional. You got the sense that these people wanted to be there, they were prepared and strove to do well. When you look around the campus today and you see people walking around in pajamas or very informal clothing and treat going to school like they haven’t left their house, it almost demeans in a sense the professional aspect of a research university. If changing into a decent set of clothing is too much effort and not worth it, how does that reflect on your performance as a student or your motives for being a student? College attendance is a norm in our culture today, while it wasn’t 50 years ago. This difference in style illustrates how today’s culture has shifted to taking for granted a college education.

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Patrick Stewart changed my life. Yes, I know how that sounds.

I’ve always been fascinated by technology and telecommunications in particular. The ability to share ideas and data in seconds from anywhere on the planet is unheard of in any prior generation. As far back as I can remember I’ve had a knack for all things electronic. For one reason or another, I can’t do calculus to save my life, but when it comes to computers, and other electronics I just get it instinctively. I spent a better part of my childhood and early teens teaching myself to fix things in between episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation even though “inversing tachyon fields” is rarely a legitimate solution in the real world. However thanks to my time spent tinkering and learning by some unprecedented self motivation, I find myself in a datacenter job at age sixteen, working with people who are shocked to find later that a sixteen year old kid saved their businesses thousands of dollars worth of downtime. Now as I’ve moved on to a different company, and am a few years wiser, I find more and more it is the people who have a real passion for what it is they do that makes them good at it. I can say with certainty that all the people who really are good at what they do are the kids who were like me; they were fascinated and couldn’t help themselves but to absorb any and all information like a sponge.

A brief overview of David Brewer

My name is David Brewer, a sophomore at UMBC. I live relatively close by in Annapolis, MD, my hometown, where I work for an IT contractor that ends up putting me all over the Baltimore-Washington area. However, while my work is important, if I had to choose one of the most important aspects of my life, it would be travel. My parents took me to Europe when I was about twelve and it totally changed my outlook of the world and I realized how much I enjoy visiting unfamiliar places. I made a commitment to myself this year to travel more and ended up visiting Boston and Montreal when my schedule allowed. This winter I’ll be returning to Europe to visit friends in England and Belgium. Technology is my talent and my career, but the opportunity to travel, particularly abroad, is what I work for.

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