This past weekend, the NYU Tisch community came together to have it’s 50th Anniversary Celebration. To kick off the festivities, the dean hosted a continental breakfast in the lobby of 721 Broadway on Friday. This was spectacular news for me, as it meant I wouldn’t have to cut into my meal plan that morning. I found myself a bench near the back and started shoving gourmet doughnuts into my mouth. On this cold, rainy, hurricane Joaquin Phoenix day, I sipped on hot cider that was nothing less than the nectar of the gods.

While I was stuffing my face, a field trip group of first graders piled into the lobby and up the stairs. Rain coats, boots and galoshes squeaked around the main floor. First grade is around the age where you stop being cute and start pretending you’re grown up. These kids were laughing and having a good time, talking about how college doesn’t look that different than their own school, joking around in their own little friend groups. You could’ve placed this scene in any period of history and it wouldn’t look out of place. Kids have always been kids.

But drinking from my fifth cup of apple cider, I realized that I was watching one of the most spectacular generations of them all.

These six-year-olds have always lived in a world with internet. They have no memories of the dial-up sounds of a computer warming up. Talking to your relatives in China face to face in real time has always been a part of their reality. Information is readily accessible to them in an instant, and they will probably never taste a world that isn’t constantly connected.

Their world is one of a million screens. Every adult has always had a cellphone. Each of them have been raised touching, swiping, poking, and sliding. Screens are interactive intuitive things, not locked windows.

They even march to a different beat music-wise. No one in this generation will probably buy a CD in their lifetime, unless future hipsters find discs to be retro and vintage. And the way the world is turning toward streaming, none of them may ever buy an album, but expect it as part of their monthly subscription to Apple Music.

Theirs will be the first generation to see a humanity land on another planet. Diseases such as cancer could be cured in their lifetime. The intimidating but promising discoveries in artificial intelligence may become a part of their everyday lives. The world that they will live in will be completely different than ours, more connected, more open than ever before.

But right now, they’re slipping on the wet floors of a building that’s over a hundred years old. And they’re staring up at us in awe, thinking that we’ve got it all figured out. Their eyes will see wonders we could never imagine and they look to us for inspiration. But really, we’re just getting by with gourmet doughnuts and hot cider.