Natalie Gochnour serves as an associate dean in the David Eccles School of Business and director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. She also serves as the chief economist for the Salt Lake Chamber. In these roles she helps connect the Eccles School with the broader business community and shares applied economic and business research.
During her presentation she began to describe our day in age with words such as divisive, prosperous, polarized, and disruptive. Current times are different than any other time in history which gives us an opportunity to change the way we think and act to make a difference. She also described that our generation is made up of millennials and generation Z, she compared these generations to the baby boomers and how different our ideology and outlooks are from each other. There are many downfalls to millenials such as living with parents for a long amount of time, in some ways we tend to be lazier, and we think we are entitled, but there are positives to as well. She explained that we are more creative, in some ways more intelligent, and open to change.
We need to shape the way we think. We need to restore idealism because we live in a place where there is so much dependency, we should works towards having connections with people. Natalie explained how these connections with people have been hard because of the huge difference between us and baby boomers, they use technics and values that worked in the past, but not as much anymore.
Natalie tried to stay away from convincing us what political views we should take, but she did make good points about certain political views. She sad that it would be in our best interest to understand conservatism because it’s what made our country what it is and our country did not become as powerful and successful as it did by practicing socialism. Things in the political world have gotten rocky and different than they were. The old republican party admired excellence and intellectual excellence, it requires work, time, experience, and talent, populism does the opposite it is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.
Our world is in a place of confusion, we are not sure to where we are going or where we came from. It is our time to make decisions that can ultimately change out country in a better way. We don’t know who we are right now, we have the opportunity to become what we want to become .

Written by student, Peyton Feller