Craig Kanalley

Senior Editor, Big News & Live Events, The Huffington Post

These are the Millennials. They grew up with computers, instant messaging on AIM, using Facebook in school, they're not afraid to communicate in GIFs or acronyms, and they're poised to do great things in the future. That's why they're worth watching. And that's why I thought I'd put together a list of them.

Patrick O'Connor

Associate Dean of College Counseling, Cranbrook-Kingswood School; Author, 'College is Yours 2.0'

The college experience can't be fully be realized if the only way students meet is through a screen, or rushing to get credentialed to be a better worker. College is more than learning a trade; it's also about learning to be a better person.

Hong Mei Pang

Member of RAISE (Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast)

I finally understood -- that the core of the American Dream exceeds the cliché of pulling oneself up by the bootstrap; it requires that we forge a multi-faceted community that reaches out to those in need.

Peter McGraw and Joel Warner

The Humor Code

According to the Benign Violation Theory, humor has its roots in potentially negative experiences (i.e., violations) that are made to seem okay in some way (i.e., benign). That makes joke telling risky because you can fail by being too benign or by creating too much of a violation.

Cecil Castellucci

Author

When I was a little girl, I loved the muppets. We all did. We all do! There was something about the muppet movie that struck all the right notes in my heart. There was something so right about it.

Ken Ilgunas

Writer, Traveler

I was determined to get my degree debt-free. I bought a 1994 Ford Econoline for $1,500 and secretly lived inside it in a campus parking lot for two years.

Sam Dorison

Fellow, Center on National Security at Fordham Law School

The average detainee at Guantánamo has been held there for over nine years. Nine years ago Barack Obama was serving his first term as Chair of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Illinois Senate.

Jason Salzman

Former media critic at the Rocky Mountain News; Blogger, www.bigmedia.org.

"Their jobs didn't require source building, or other pieces of journalism that are more difficult. It was database work. And at the end, the experienced political journalist had to decide what to call the ad. Was it true? Exaggerated?"

Pamela Meyer

Founder and CEO, Calibrate

What do a hard shove in an NBA playoff game, a wayward ball in The Masters golf tournament, and a high school soccer match in Utah have in common? Nike's new slogan sums it up: Winning Takes Care of Everything.

Tony Woodcock

President, New England Conservatory of Music

A life-long pursuit, becoming a good musician requires self-challenge, self-criticism, a desire to go further, deeper, into a musical work, exploring what a composer meant or how best to realize one's own expressive ideas in an original composition.

Turk Pipkin

Writer, filmmaker, co-founder of The Nobelity Project

You made it. Or I should say, you've almost made it. For the past four years, maybe five, the number of ways you could blow it have grown smaller and smaller, and you're now down to just a couple of small steps between you and your diploma. My main advice to you is, don't trip up now.

Lisa Wade

Professor of sociology based in Los Angeles

For the parents out there, it's a good idea to push past our own comfort zones when thinking about what might be possible for our kids.

Don Meyer, Ph.D.

President, Valley Forge Christian College

I don't know of any student at Valley Forge Christian College who wants to be mediocre or even just a little above average. Within each heart is a quest to excel... to make a difference... to change the world.

Lawrence Wittner

Professor of History emeritus, SUNY Albany

Although many Americans believe their universities are places where administrators and faculty members coexist on a fairly equal basis, the reality is that this is far from the case.

Neil McCarthy

Political activist and New York attorney

What should all these people say? How about this: "We're sorry. We apologize for giving you an economy without sufficient jobs and a politics that cannot pass what 90 percent of you want."

Jon Kolko

Vice President of Design, MyEdu

Yet what is lost in the ideological debate of MOOCs and online learning is an understanding of the actual students that are taking so long to graduate, wasting so much of their own and taxpayer's money, and graduating without employable skills.

Adam Kirk Edgerton

'Urban' educator

I was terrified when I drove up to Massachusetts by myself in a 1996 Honda Accord. I was terrified when I graduated. And I was terrified when I moved in with my partner. But that terror will pass and fade into something more stable, more secure, and more exciting.