Congratulations to the Class of 2012! You’ve worked hard and now you will get the chance to enter the real world.

The scary thing is that I can vividly remember the year most of you were born, 1994. Here are some of the things that happened that year.

It was the last time that Alabama and Auburn met in the Iron Bowl when neither team had a loss.

Michael Jordan was a Birmingham Baron that summer. And the 1994 baseball season ended in August with the infamous strike.

Alabama’s Heather Whitestone became the first hearing-impaired contestant to win Miss America.

This was also the first time that Republicans won control of the House of Representatives and Senate since 1954.

The white Ford Bronco chase of O.J. Simpson also occurred in June of that year. Simpson, as you remember, was accused of killing his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.

The first Winter Olympics that didn’t occur in the same year as a Summer Olympics was in 1994. Speaking of the winter games, the figure-skater fiasco between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding occurred prior to that Olympics.

Members of the Class of 2012 who were born on March 1 share the same birthday as Justin Bieber.

Nirvana singer and songwriter Kurt Kobain was found dead with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 5. Also former President Richard Nixon died that year along with former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, wife of assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

An F4 tornado hit a church in Piedmont, Ala., killing 22 people.

One of the top films at that year’s Academy Awards was “Schindler’s List.”

Well, that gives you a taste of what 1994 was, since you were too young to remember it.

I wish you good luck in the next step of your life.

Brent Maze is the managing editor of the Hartselle Enquirer.