I sat upright in my bed and flung my arm back to stop the horrendous noise coming from my alarm clock at 8 a.m. last Thursday. Before my eyes were open, I jumped out of bed into the chilly morning air and raced in my Tweetie Bird slippers to the shower.

I was late. But, knowing what I know now, I should have just hit the snooze button and returned to my Josh Hartnett dreamland.

My goal that morning was to make it to the NIU Board of Trustees meeting in enough time to grab a cup of coffee and tuck in my shirt before anyone realized I was a lowly, sleep-deprived editor from the Northern Star.

When I arrived at the Holmes Student Center’s Clara Sperling Skyroom just a few minutes before 9 a.m., I saw the laptop and the projection screen and thanked my lucky stars — something interesting was going to happen.

Three cups of coffee, two mini bagels and one long executive session later, President John Peters announced NIU’s new affiliation with Twin Lights, a learning/teaching software corporation waiting to outfit our College of Business with the latest in leadership training curriculum.

Twin Lights has developed interactive video software that acts like a virtual choose-your-own-adventure novel. The program orients you with a little background about the company you have acquired then sends you off on your capitalist merry way.

The technology that goes into it is amazing! The ability to put yourself in this quasi-realistic role to test your skills would be incredibly beneficial.

I wanted to bust out a happy dance — way to go NIU! — until the representative from Twin Lights stepped up to the podium and opened her mouth.

She described my generation as “children raised on video games,” and emphasized the importance of bringing education to a level at which we are interested to learn.

Video games! Of course! What college student — nay, what business major — wouldn’t love a stimulating game of Fortune 500 Frogger?

And, to make sure Twin Lights software was really on our level, the program corporation that we’d interact with at this Thursday morning thriller was none other than Pucinni’s Pizza.

Because everyone knows college students can’t resist the pie, right?

As I watched my administrators and the other audience members giggle gleefully and congratulate each other on being masters of the universe, I felt sick.

And when I watched the video of the ambitious, flirtatious female employee propose her ideas to me, the CEO, I felt insulted.

I looked to student trustee Alex Alaniz for some sign of solidarity, but all I got was the deer-caught-in-headlights look that he maintained throughout much of the meeting.

This couldn’t be the image my generation had established for itself.

After 18, 19, 20 years of hard work and the dedication it takes in pursuit of a degree, we are rewarded with pizza and video games.

My first fears were that Twin Lights had completely missed its target audience, but then I realized that this was the impression of a roomful of the people that have the awesome responsibility of educating us.

It bothers me that it’s entirely possible this is the reputation my generation has molded for itself. Do we want to be forever identified by our couch potato, snack-munching habits of adolescence?

Generation Xers got off their collective depressive duffs and shocked the world with the dot-com boom.

It’s time for our generation to rise up from our childhood and carve ourselves an impressive notch in the proverbial tree of life.