This year's graduates blend realism, ideals

Like many students in the class of 2004, Julien Raffinot began college four years ago believing that American life was on automatic pilot.

The tech bubble hadn't burst. The stock market was a global wonder. Even after the attack of the USS Cole that fall, the name Osama bin Laden registered only as a minor blip on the national psyche.

Mr. Raffinot, who graduates this summer from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is a bit jaded about the US and its role in the world.

"My awareness of injustice has been heightened," says Raffinot, "but so has my skepticism about whether I can change anything."

Raffinot is emblematic of his generation. He saw America's economic colossus stumble under the weight of false dotcom expectations and corporate corruption.

He winced as commercialism pervaded popular culture. Sept. 11 jolted his sense of place in the world, and ensuing wars and occupations have prompted him to rethink what he once took for granted, including his career.

The students who enter the "real world" this summer have, in part, been made more cynical by these seismic events. But many of them who studied in the Boston area, the de facto capital of collegiate America, admit to a new way of looking at the world.

Of course, they are most concerned with finding a job, a place to live, and establishing a social life. But their awareness of their country and world are uniquely deep. From budding jazz musicians to mechanical engineers, their overall posture might best be described as wary idealism.

"It might mean taking a few years and doing some nonprofit work somewhere in the world," says Raffinot. "But I'm not sure I'll be tempted to go see the worst of it firsthand."

Generations of Americans have often been defined by traumatic world events. What many viewed as a meaningless world war alienated the "lost generation" of the 1920s. War in Vietnam had a similar effect in the '60s.

The national introspection resulting from Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq are the context from which the class of 2004 is rethinking its role in the world.

Katusha Galitzine began to pursue what she calls her "radical agenda" shortly after Sept. 11.

By the fall of 2002, the Emerson College graduate began protesting the build-up for war in Iraq. New friends taught her about labor issues. She soon began advocating for higher faculty salaries.

"My reaction to [Sept. 11] was to learn as much as I could about international relations and politics in general," says Ms. Galitzine, who plans to go to law school and become active in politics. "You began to feel guilty if you didn't have a hold of what was going on."

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where future chemical engineers outnumber would-be diplomats 10 to one, world events influenced students' course selections.

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