<p>There was a common application actually. You typed all your information in and then photocopied it to send to various schools. No one really had a separate supplement , I only wrote the one essay for my apps, and no one made it sound like that essay was a life or death situation. You basically wanted to show you could put correct sentences together with a strong idea. No one had anyone review them. </p>
<p>People didn’t visit campuses as much. I saw my campus on move in day. And you know what? We were fine! </p>
<p>People didn’t " work out" as much back then. There were joggers and runners and in the 80s Jane Fonda made an exercise tape that was huge. She showed us how to exercise with full make up, styled hair, high cut leotard and legwarmers!</p>
<p>Didn’t Richard Simmons do HIS exercise video about the same time as Jane Fonda? </p>
<p>When my husband got his engineering degree from a no name university in 1984, he also started at $24,000 a year. Back then the prestige of your college didn’t net more income :)</p>
<p>Our car got 22 miles to the gallon and we were thrilled!</p>
<p>Yes. And for the very self-confident, there was an extreme version of the high-cut leotard that was essentially a thong in the back. My friend called them “butt flossers.” Health clubs became a huge part of the dating scene during that time.</p>
<p>123winner, State school…no essay. Filled out the application w/ a ball point pen.</p>
<p>Typing my h.s. senior year term paper (1980) almost drove me crazy…no electric typewriter…lots of white out.</p>
<p>My P/T job in 1980 involved driving a pick-up truck with “three on the tree”…manual three speed gear shift on the column. </p>
<p>My prom dress cost $30.</p>
<p>My '82 Ford Escort had vinyl seats/4 speed manual transmission/ roll up windows/no AC/AM radio. </p>
<p>The first year we were married ('82) we lived in a cold (partially underground) apt. We bought/used a kerosene stove for heat. Keronsene stoves were very popular back. then. </p>
<p>When DH started his first engineering job out of college ('81), he was paid somewhere between 22 and 25K. We though it was a LOT of money.</p>
<p>surfcity, it depended on the college. Harvard’s application definitely had an essay that was read by a committee and you used it to show how wonderful you were. I also know I filled out each application separately. The Brown application for some weird reason required that the essay be handwritten, but I typed the other two. I visited two campuses junior year and did an overnight visit at Harvard my senior year.</p>
<p>I made $2.65 an hour shelving library books in 1976. By 1984 I was making $8 an hour as an architect.</p>
<p>I remember that too! AND, I remember when your grocery store receipt had your FULL credit card number (and expiration date) printed on them. And if you dropped it in the parking lot…so what!!! What could anyone do with the card number, without the card?? :rolleyes: Ahhh, those were the days…</p>
<p>Do you remember the credit cad machines at department stores? The clerk would put your card on a manual machine and then put the sales slip with carbon paper(!) over it. She push down on a little roller thing that would make an imprint of the raised numbers on you card. </p>
<p>two economic recessions (1980 to 1982 and 1990 to 1991). We rode the first one out in grad school, but had to sweat through the second one. Thankfully, both were short-lived–not like the slow recovery we’re experiencing now (the recession may have officially ended in Q3 2009, but we haven’t had the snap back like we had in those earlier recessions).</p>
<p>unless I have overlooked it, I am shocked no one has mentioned the mullett(mid-80s) haircut!
Sadly there are some that still hang on to it even today…</p>
<p>“As filmmaker Jennifer Arnold has shown in her excellent 2001 documentary American Mullet, the three groups of people who wear mullets in large numbers are working-class Southern men, lesbians, and Mexican Americans.”</p>
<p>In my old childhood working-class NYC neighborhood of the '80s, the Vietnam War was still a sore divisive topic…especially among Vietnam Vets and various Latino immigrant/Americans. </p>
<p>Among some vets, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and some Puerto Ricans, Jane Fonda and hippies/countercultural types were evil incarnate worthy of invective and spittle for their “traitorous” actions against the war effort. </p>
<p>Other vets, Dominicans, and other Puerto Ricans felt the hippies/countercultural protests against the war were correct that the war was wrong and that the US needed to get out of the business of supporting right-wing dictators like Trujillo in Latin America and other parts of the world. </p>
<p>There was also a strong backlash against the “emasculating” hippie/hedonistic culture of the countercultural 60’s and '70s as illustrated by the mass popularization of war movies like Deer Hunter, Red Dawn, Rambo series, Top Gun, Iron Eagle, etc. Lots of cheer over US military operations in Grenada, Libya, Panama, and Gulf War I & its aftermath from elementary school till my early high school. </p>
<p>In the same period of time, popular perceptions of the military among neighbors, newsmedia, and classmates went from being mixed/slightly anti-military to being slightly pro-military. Even the problematic '90s era operations like Somalia didn’t seem to dampen this among folks who seemed to genuinely feel Gulf War I “cured the US of the “Vietnam Syndrome””.</p>
<p>I spent a good part of mid-eighties and early nineties being either pregnant or taking care of my kids… when I went on maternity leave in 1985 with my oldest, my office let me bring my “selectric typewriter” home with me to use…
We drove a VW rabbit, with a cassette player. I seem to remember that the car had a/c but maybe not.
I spent a good part of the early 80’s on business travel throughout the U.S. You used to have the shuttle that went from NY to Boston and NY to Washington. You were able to board the plane and pay for the flight on-board with a credit card and the flight attendents did use the old-fashioned machine to give you your receipt.
I also remember NY being dirty and crime-ridden…but everything was so much cheaper. I walk down streets today that you never would have ventured down in those years. The neighborhoods my d’s live in today were considered high crime areas. People who live in very-gentrified parts of Brooklyn today are astonished when we tell tales of the early 80’s and late 70’s and what it was like then. Streets today that have multi-million dollar brownstones had bombed out, boarded up buildings, trendy restaurants that used to be numbers parlors …and so it goes.</p>
<p>One problem then was that most airlines allowed smoking in the airplane. Basically, it meant that you were forced to smoke whenever someone else nearby was smoking.</p>
<p>Yes, I do recall the “smoking section” on planes and how gross that was. If you see the movie Argo you will notice how people smoked all the time… in offices, on planes. I actually don’t know one person who smokes that I am aware of.</p>