Walking across the campus of Pittsburgh's prefix = st1 /CarnegieMellonUniversityone delightful spring day, I came upon a table filled with young people chatting and enjoying the fine weather. Several had identical blue T-shirts with "Trilogy @ CMU" written across them--Trilogy being an Austin, Texasbased software company with a reputation of recruiting  our top students. I walked over to the table. "Are you guys here to recruit?" I asked. "No,  ly not," they replied firmly. "We're not recruiters. We're just hanging out, playing a little frisbee with our friends." How interesting, I thought. They've come to campus on a workday, all the way from Austin, just to hang out with some new friends.    As I later learned, they were gifted students who had inked the highest-paying deal in the history of their departments.    I asked one young man why he was going to a smaller city in Taxas. The company is excellent, he told me. There are also terrific people and the work is challenging. Though he had several good job offers fromPittsburgh's high-tech firms and knew the city well, he said he felt the city lacked the life-styles options, cultural diversity, and tolerant attitude that would make it attractive to him. As he summed it up: "How would I fit in here?"   What a change from my own college days, just a little more than 20 years ago, when students would put on their dressiest clothes and carefully hide any counterculture tendencies to prove that they could fit in with the company. Today, apparently, it's the company trying to fit in with the students.   These young men and their lifestyles represent a lively new force in the enonomy and life ofAmerica. They are members of what I call the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid part of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common belief that values creativity, individuality, difference, and advantage. Why were the young people in the university campus?
To get recruited in Pittsburgh. To celebrate their successful recruitment. To relax themselves away from work. To meet their old school mates.