In November 2013, when Bentley University collaborated with the Bloomberg Business Summit in Chicago to present initial PreparedU top-line findings, panelist Shama Hyder made this astute observation about millennials and their career preferences: “Business in general has a branding problem. Most students still think of commerce as synonymous with Wall Street greed and Enron-like fiascos. Ask these same students if they wish to work for Facebook or Google, and the numbers will look a lot different. We need to do a better job defining what business means in today’s world. Millennials care about more than just taking home a paycheck. They care about working at an organization which makes an impact, and sees them as more than cogs in the greater machine.”

The balance between making money and having a satisfying life is paramount. As we’ve seen reported in our series, Companies Where Millennials Thrive, firms such as global marketing leader Epsilon, pioneering Arbella Insurance, and software start-up Briefca.se work hard to encourage work-life balance, giving back to society, and workplace happiness, recognizing that these things are more important to many millennials than a defining title, industry, or even geographic area. At the same time, millennials are embracing the Gig Economy, or they’re changing jobs every 2.5 years on average (compared to every five years for Gen X). Soon they will become the majority of the workforce, even as they are actively defining the workplace of the future for us all.

Take, for example, this piece from the Huffington Post on Why Careers Are a Thing of the Past. While not widespread, when millennials pursue professional success and personal status by accepting “dropout grants” from Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel to start their own companies, it may be emblematic of a generational mindset. Do degrees matter as much as they used to, or is it enough for millennials simply to demonstrate that they’re innovative, driven, clever, hardworking and accomplished? It’s an issue that Bentley’s own usability expert, Bill Gribbons, has noted for some time.

For those millennials who do stay in college to prepare for a career, many are choosing to have their cake and eat it, too. Unlike previous generations, they don’t feel their careers need to be a tradeoff between doing something they love or doing something that pays the bills. Rather, as The Washington Post reports in this piece, Want to do what you love and get paid for it?, many millennials are choosing careers in fields like health care and engineering, which rank highly in both meaningfulness and compensation.

And millennials are also more excited than any other generation of U.S. workers by the risk, potential adventures, and unique life experiences offered by accepting a job in another country, according to The Wall Street Journal report, Americans Don’t Fancy Jobs Abroad. Oh, Except Millennials. In a survey of 200,000 workers by the Boston Consulting Group and the Network, an alliance of global recruiting websites, 59 percent of American respondents between the ages of 21 and 30 said they would be willing to go abroad, compared to just 35 percent overall. “The study’s authors speculate that members of the so-called millennial generation have been forced to expand their horizons because many have had difficulties entering the U.S. job market in the wake of the recession . . . though it may be more than that.”

Perhaps millennials really are driving us all to work to live, not live to work. As Karl Moore of Forbes writes, not only do Millennials Work For Purpose, Not a Paycheck, but “fulfillment at work, fulfillment at home . . . millennials want it all and they want it fast. Unlike many modern workers, millennials want to be home for dinner, and want to feel like their 9-to-5 job has a real purpose. They are constantly seeking purpose in what they do for a living and at the same time want to know how their job is helping them get to the top. They’re constantly questioning where they are going next and why.”

April Lane is a freelance writer.