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How 9/11 Changed the Entry-Level Job Market

by Andrea Puckett

When I stepped out of college, I felt I would conquer the world. However, I quickly learned the best teacher is failure. I completed my undergraduate degree in 2001. After graduation, I remember thinking that it would be no problem to find a professional job because I had the skills and people would want me. Also, I felt that I would be like my father who graduated from college in the 1970s and had the same job for 30 plus years where he was able to rise from the bottom to the top. What I didn’t realize at the time that my father’s generational rules, my role model, after college didn’t apply to my situation.

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How Dick Meets Jane in the Modern World

by Andrea Puckett

In 1973, my parents got married. My mother was 21 and my father was 26. My mother only dated one man her whole life and was a virgin until her wedding night. My parents dated three years before they were married and endured a long distance relationship while my father was finishing up college. They were married seven years before they had me and my mother at 28 was thought to be too old, by her friends, to have children. Today, they have been married for over 30 years and are still a happy couple.

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The Definition of a Hero

by Andrea Puckett

Tonight, I learned the definition of what a hero is. Since I was a child I have always known the technical definition of a hero as being a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life; however, I have heard the term used so freely by the government in the times of war as either a propaganda technique or as a way to consul grieving family members that somehow it lost its meaning.

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Why We Should Care: Baby Boomers are Retiring

by Andrea Puckett

When I was a child, I never really thought about what the world would be like when my parents, baby boomers, either retired or needed extra medical attention. However, a few months ago, these were two issues that I was confronted with.

My father was born in 1946 at the peak of the baby boomer generation. He has always been my pillar of strength both physically and emotionally but in November he fell down a mountain and that fall would change our world forever. He was out deer hunting, something that he has done every deer hunting season since his childhood, and got his foot tangled in a tree root and fell down the mountain. He broke several vertebrae and was hospitalized for four weeks. Without warning, my pillar of strength was broken. Laying in the hospital waiting to have surgery was one of the first times in all of his 59 years that he had time to reflect and actually think about what it was like to get older.

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Listening to Portable Music

by Andrea Puckett

In middle school, I used to carry around a box of tapes and extra batteries for long car rides. I would spend many hours making mixed tapes of depressing love songs and would listen to Casey Kasem and Shadow Stevens count down the top 20 hits of the week so that I could record the newest songs that were out without having to buy the whole tape. In my sophomore year of high school, my grandmother brought me my first CD player.

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Going to Preschool at 23

by Andrea Puckett

Two years ago, I went back to school. It wasn’t a college or a professional program, but it was preschool. This was my first time at attending a preschool because when I was a child I told my mom that I didn’t want to go to one and she didn’t send me. I attended not as a student but as a teacher. However, I think that I was the one that gained a world of knowledge.

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New Year's Eve: Settling Down without Settling

by Andrea Puckett

The New Year brings no baggage with it. It is a time where people reflect back to the woes of the previous and celebrate being alive. However, what makes up a good new year is different for everyone.

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