Students shift their focus towards achieving civic duty

Our generation, once labeled apathetic and disconnected from global issues, is now focusing on helping others, studies have found.

   

Volunteering, entering professions centered around helping the less fortunate and traveling more extensively for civic-minded work, generation Y may now exceed college-aged groups that came before them in the fight to help mend the many dilemmas facing our global society.
   

With human rights issues such as genocide, global warming, child trafficking and widespread war plaguing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is only right that the young and capable set their minds towards making change.
   

In the age of President Obama, it is time that generation Y take initiative to make positive changes in the world around them by becoming more civically engaged, rather than merely relying on the generation currently in power to fulfill the ideologies we so vehemently support. We as a youth movement voted in a revolutionary president with big ideas and promises of change. It is now our duty to keep the momentum of change rolling past the confines of the United States and into the future.
   

This trend towards increased volunteer work may have strong ties to the suffering economy. With students unable to find work after graduation, traveling overseas to help the less fortunate is a feasible and honorable option. This progress acknowledging social responsibility cannot, however, end when the global economy begins to rebound. The problems facing places like Rwanda and Tibet will not be solved within the next ten years and therefore the efforts of our generation cannot end in the short term, either.

   

Increasing opportunities continue to arise for students to see the world —outlets like study abroad, curriculum that is focused on increasing awareness of disheartening global issues and an economy that allows newly-graduated millenniums the freedom to take time away from their intended careers. It is necessary that this trend of social responsibility become a permanent fixture in our moral consciousness.