They went fresh from a newfound confidence into a world less kind.

High school seniors, then, the class of 2000 grabbed their diplomas and faced the future at a time of prosperity and peace.

A decade later, in 2010, none could have predicted the challenges they faced in one of the most turbulent decades in American history.

In May 1997, The Journal Gazette gathered 15 area high school freshmen for a roundtable discussion to share their thoughts as the future class of 2000. The newspaper talked again with them as they prepared to graduate.

As another senior class readies to cross the stage, we checked in again with that original group to see how the decade has treated them.

We found nine: Matt Brandt, a St. Louis product engineer; Demetria Curry, a health information management specialist in Tennessee; Jim DeSelm, a Chicago actor; Ese (Isiorho) Esan, a Detroit newspaper reporter; Dustin Martin, an engineer manager in Illinois; Gina (Ruch) Stepusin, an Indianapolis first-grade teacher; Jack Tippmann, a New Haven mechanic and outfitter; Jill (Vanderweele) Williamson, an accountant in Fort Wayne; and Adam Wehage, a Van Wert police officer.

They are on the older end of what is called the millennial generation. Now closing in on age 30, they were high school seniors at a time “when a dot-com startup that never came close to a profit spent millions to make a singing sock puppet a star of the Super Bowl,” as The Associated Press put it. “A time when one of economists’ big worries was what might happen if unemployment fell too low.”

The rosy outlook quickly changed.

As they headed to college or jobs in fall 2000, the country was divided by a presidential election that landed in the Supreme Court. The horror of 9/11 followed, then wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Vatican replaced a pope. Hurricane Katrina revealed government inadequacies. Easy credit, home foreclosures, the recession, financial bailouts, rising unemployment, $4 gasoline, bird flu, swine flu.

“I feel like it was a decade of a lot of change. And, I guess, even a lot of loss of innocence. Does that make sense?” said Brandt, a Churubusco High School grad living in St. Louis.

“And so from the terrorist attack early on to the deregulations that happened in government – and then finding out later on that all of those kind of came back to bite us – I think just have made me much more aware, I guess, that there are certain things in life that are important, like family and friends.”

Jobs

Even as a high school freshman, finding direction – especially as a member of the class of 2000 – was on Brandt’s mind.

“All the pressure that’s on us, all the things they want us to do, it’ll come in time, like figuring out what we want to do when we get older, figuring out what kind of job we want,” he told The Journal Gazette in 1997.

Most in the group had clear goals, and college was their destination. That doesn’t mean careers were in stone or the path was clear.

For Brandt it took an extra year to figure it out. Call it the Starbucks School of Human Relations. He earned an engineering degree but worked a year afterward as an assistant manager at an Indianapolis Starbucks to find his way. He credits the coffee shop with providing people skills for his current job as a product engineer.

Martin, a chemical engineer, and Stepusin, a teacher, were hired in their fields after college. Williamson, who focused on radiography, and Curry, who planned on nursing, changed majors.

Esan, who first envisioned a career in psychology, dropped out of college for a short time to be a hotel desk clerk and work at a Subway, calling it today “one of the worst mistakes I’d made.”

Adam Wehage, a Van Wert High School grad, earned an engineering degree but became a Van Wert police officer and loves it.

Jack Tippmann, a self-described “hands-on guy,” attended auto mechanics school after New Haven High School. One of 12 children raised on a family farm, he found his passion in Canada leading low-cost hunts to augment his pay and help support his own five kids.

Jim DeSelm earned a vocal performance degree, worked three years at the Fort Wayne church where his dad is the pastor, moved with his wife to Philadelphia where he waited tables as she earned her MBA and spent eight months in the African nation of Burundi for her field work.

A performance career – something he was eyeing in 2000 – became distant until a friend got him an acting job at Amish Acres.

Today, DeSelm lives in Chicago, where he is an office temp and acts when he can, and his wife supports his dream, even if it doesn’t pay the bills.

“I was really concerned that I was going to get to a place in my life where it seemed entirely too far away and it wasn’t even worth taking a run at anymore,” he said.

The wars

The group has been largely sheltered from the war on terror. Tippmann said several family members have survived their stints in the military, though a high school classmate lost a leg.

Working with a youth group at his father’s church after college, DeSelm found himself counseling young people considering military service in a war he didn’t support.

“So, that was tough for me,” he said. “To be supportive of them, to be encouraging of them in whatever way I could, but maybe to try to ask some hard questions about what’s this about.”

Esan, the journalist, “couldn’t believe that there was so much bad in the world.”

With the good often getting scant attention, “I kind of learned to accept the bad, but realize there’s an awful lot of good out there.”

For Brandt, war and other events gave him a narrower view of the world.

“I’d say with the decade as a whole, I think I had to learn to live with the different things that were going on and realizing that more and more that things, that even if they happen overseas or in Iraq or wherever, they affect me here and now and affect the job I do,” he said. “They affect the gas I buy, for example.”

Easy credit

Aside from the wars, perhaps nothing defines the past decade more than easy credit, subprime mortgages, high homeowner default rates and home foreclosures.

Tippmann, the mechanic, said most people he knew in high school had a decent plan for the future and didn’t get into financial trouble.

“I would say my credit is not – I’m not 20 grand in debt,” Tippmann said. “I got my small, moderate house, and we pay the bills.”

Curry acknowledged maxing out one credit card before paying it off. A South Side High School grad and health information specialist in Nashville, Tenn., she has gotten rid of that debt.

“I was very aware of those things,” said Martin, a Wawasee High School graduate. “To this day I don’t carry a balance on my credit card.”

While it has worked out, DeSelm said he was prey to lenders who used easy borrowing to push home ownership over renting.

“Yeah, we got a no-money-down loan,” he said. “We’re definitely one of those couples who got a home mortgage that maybe shouldn’t have, really, shouldn’t have gotten it the way that we did.”

The recession

The recession that followed the housing crisis has left few scars among the group of nine.

In September, Williamson’s husband, Gabriel, was laid off from his job as a warehouse operator. He said he recently was hired at the Allen County General Motors plant.

“But that’s probably the only major downfall in the past decade,” Jill Williamson said. “But at the same time, that’s one of those that you take life one day at a time.”

In Detroit, hit hard by the recession, Esan said she and her husband, Boe, bought a house “for a really, really good price.”

“But now that we’ve got the house, the fear is when it’s time to sell, will the housing market be at a place where we can sell and make a profit or break even, or will we have to walk away with a loss?” Esan said.

Brandt said the recession affected his purchases, including whether to “pack my lunch today and save $7” or go out to eat.

For Stepusin, “things have gone well. And the people I know who have lost their jobs seem to have been able to rebound really quickly and find another job pretty easily.”

Faith

Religion, sex and morals were topics that the original group of 15 students spent a good deal of time on when they met as high school freshmen at The Journal Gazette in 1997. Strong believers were tempered by skeptics. In a small way, the views reflect a national trend.

A February report by the Pew Research Center found that one in four millennials is unaffiliated with any religion, “far more than the share of older adults when they were ages 18 to 29.” Two out of three rarely or never visit a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to a recent survey by LifeWay Christian Resources.

DeSelm, the pastor’s son, sat among the 1997 group and strongly defended his faith as some talked about cussing as “just words,” doing drugs as “not that big of an issue” and the Bible as maybe “just made up.”

Esan said then that if given a choice, she wouldn’t go to church.

“I think that without church, I would be like, I wouldn’t say worse, but I wouldn’t know a few of the things that I know now.”

Today, Esan, a reporter whose job is covering Detroit’s nightlife, sees the value of church in “connections with other people with similar beliefs, but I don’t feel it’s one of those things that you have to do on a regular basis like I did when I was younger, like my parents had me do when I was younger.”

DeSelm, an actor who calls the theater “a weird place to try to live a life of faith,” points to high school as a time when young people begin to look beyond the “you-do-this-and-you-don’t-do-that” view of faith.

“Because, like it or not, the world doesn’t operate in the kinds of tidy black and whites that the church sometimes likes to draw in,” he said. “I would say that, yeah, my faith is different, but the foundation of it has not changed. How I choose to live it out and how I choose to hold other people to it, maybe, has changed.”

The future

As they begin families and look to future jobs, the class of 2000 will face more change.

There are 26 million more people in the U.S. than when the class graduated in 2000. Baby boomers are holding on to jobs that could be theirs.

Before their children reach high school, there’s the challenge of closing the education gap for minorities, who will fill future jobs and possibly more than half of the classroom seats by 2023, according to the Population Reference Bureau.

For the nine profiled here, all but one are married. Four have children or are expecting. Most are working far from their hometowns and enjoying it, though they come back home for occasional visits.

“I love Fort Wayne for my family, but the decision to stay here in Nashville was more so for myself,” Curry said. “Sometimes I feel like if you stay in the comfort zone, you’ll never be motivated enough to do more or to do better.”

“It’s just once you move to a bigger city, it’s kind of hard, I think, to go back,” said Stepusin, of Auburn, who now lives in Indianapolis.

Williamson and Tippmann, though, plan to stay in the Fort Wayne area.

“I would say I hope I’ve chosen my path correctly, and I hope to be well along with it” in another 10 years, said Tippmann, who plans to have more children, live in New Haven and expand his outdoor career. “You know, I mean the sky’s the limit.”

Brandt wants to run his own engineering firm. Stepusin would like to be a principal. Wehage, the policeman, and Martin, the chemical engineer, plan to advance in their careers in the next decade.

DeSelm and his wife want to stay in Chicago, meet new friends, grow roots and leave their transient life behind. Recently painting a room in their apartment means “We’re here, and we’re actually investing in the place that we’re living in,” DeSelm said.

The class of 2000.

It’s an arbitrary year, of course, holding no more meaning than any other. But these are the faces of the new century, the millennials.

“I don’t know that the class of 2000 was any more special as far as the people that were in the class or anything like that,” Esan said. “But just the attention that it got when you said that you graduated in 2000, it elicited a response from people.”

rshawgo@jg.net