What I Learned From Taking a Train Ride With a Bunch of Millennials

The Millennial Generation—those born between 1981 and 2000 or thereabouts—often get a bad rap in the media. A Time Magazine cover story in May called them the “Me Me Me Generation” describing them as lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.

Vast generalizations of generations, of course, are just that. Stereotyping the latest generation has long been a way of life among adults (you know, “kids these days _________”). And everyone seems to make sweeping predictions about Millennials that often contradict each other. After all, for every Time magazine article there is another story about how the Millennials will save us all.

Last week, I had the opportunity to join two dozen twenty-something entrepreneurs who were part of a 10-day transcontinental train trip to discover the United States and themselves. Each of participants on board the Millennial Trains Project had to pitch a social-good project and raise $5,000 to join the trek. By day, in stops in cities along the way for San Francisco to Washington, they worked on the projects and met with local entrepreneurs and leaders to learn about good ideas that possibly could be copied elsewhere.

As they traveled at night, they heard from guest mentors who lectured on entrepreneurship, the media, and leadership. I hopped on board the Chicago-to-Pittsburgh leg to lead a discussion about the future of higher education.

In the short time I spent with this group of particular Millennials and listened to their intellect, their concerns, their ideas for solving the issues that the Baby Boomers will kick down to the rest of us, I came away inspired, and as a dad of two girls in the generation that follows, much more hopeful about their future.

So at the risk of making the same broad generalizations about a generation as everyone else does, here is perhaps what we all can learn from this particular encounter with twenty-somethings on board the Millennial Trains Project:

Think and make connections across silos rather than within them.

In discussions, these Millennials could reference a work of literature, pop culture, a historical fact, or an economic theory. That’s likely the result of changes in the curriculum at many colleges over the last decade or so that redesigned academic programs to combine broad themes across majors, focused introductory classes around answering big questions, and explored the answers through the lens of different disciplines.

We learn by doing, not just by listening and reading.

In an age when information flows like water and great college lectures are just a few swipes away on our smart phones, learning is sometimes best accomplished by applying in the real world what you learned in a book or in a classroom. At each stop on this train trip, these Millennials had to figure out how to advance their project ideas by finding and interviewing sources or testing their theories and then reporting back to the group each night about how they spent their day.

Force yourself to disconnect and just think.

A cross-country train journey gives you the time to reflect on what you see and experience in this vast nation. And even in 2013, it doesn’t provide a wireless connection every mile along the way. So whether they liked it or not, these twenty-somethings couldn’t text, tweet, or update their Facebook status at any moment of the day and night. We should all disconnect in the same way to reflect each day about what we have learned.

Don’t be afraid to ask even the simple questions.

Millennials might be described as narcissistic, but they don’t think they know everything. They were not afraid to ask questions, even simple ones. They asked more questions than almost any other audience I've been with in recent months. Yes, the answers to a lot of things can be found on Google. But asking questions, face-to-face in a discussion, allows context, follow-up, and the humility that we don’t know everything in life even if we think we do.

See and learn from the world, today.

This one comes from Keith Bellows, the editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler, who spoke to the train participants on their final night on board. He said that Baby Boomers use travel as a reward for their work in life, while Millennials use travel to “move forward.” Even so, only about 1 percent of American college students study abroad. In an age when the world is flat, we all need to travel to learn about what’s around us, even if it’s only a few states away on a train.

Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large at The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students.

Sign up for updates on the book here and receive one of two free PDF companion guides, Making the College Decision or Colleges of the Future.

Photo: The Millennial Trains Project; Kent Ford, entrepreneurship and innovation officer with the United Nations Foundation addresses the participants on the train. 

Original article/post can be located here.