I am interested in the challenges that face students who are the first in their families to attend college, or “first generation students”, and students from poor and working class families and communities. Why? Because I was one of them. My brother and I came from a poor, rural community and were the first in our family to complete bachelor’s degrees.
While I was growing up, my dad was a skilled laborer and my mom was a full-time mom. Dad is artistic and gifted with numbers and spatial information, yet very obviously (to the people who know him best) has a reading-related learning disability – dyslexia, perhaps. A member of two labor unions – the Carpenters’ Union and the Millwrights Union – while we were growing up, he was able to ride out the tail end of the era of good paying, unionized American industrial jobs. After high school, as a very attractive and bright young woman, Mom started college. She told us stories about the privilege that she witnessed in her dorm mates, of not being able to afford the sweater she needed to participate in cheerleading, and of worrying about her grandmother’s health. Within the first semester, she left school. Though Mom never completed a baccalaureate degree, she has always been hungry for knowledge. While we grew up there was always one room in the house that was overflowing with books as a testament to her hungry mind.
My brother and I, in the same class since Kindergarten, graduated from a very small – about 400 students in Kindergarten to twelfth grade – under-resourced and under-performing high school in the rural Adirondack Park, in northeastern New York.
After high school, we both went on to attend Middlebury College in Vermont. It was just a half-hour drive from the town that we grew up in, yet a world apart on so many fronts. Our high school emphasized discipline, structure, and respect for authority. The vast majority of my peers at Middlebury came from boarding schools and wealthier communities. Their schools emphasized individual expression, critical thinking, and leadership. In high school, I had been a big frog in a small pond and suddenly I found that I was a rather ill-equipped frog with a lot of territory that I needed to cover in order to catch up with the other frogs.
And the differences between me and my peers didn’t end there. We didn’t dress the same, hold the same values, share the same views of money, have the same amount of financial resources to draw upon, handle confrontation in the same way, and so forth. I felt lonely and out of place. I was embarrassed to be the less polished, less prepared one.
With that said, my goal in talking about my experience of college, of dredging up some icky, unflattering, embarrassing memories isn’t to make myself look bad or say, “Woe is me”, but to talk about the challenges that I faced, how I failed, how I succeeded, and what I would have done differently. It takes a lot of time and energy to catch up with people who have been groomed since birth to be the best. I am talking about my experience in order to shorten the journey of young people who are coming from backgrounds that haven’t adequately prepared them for college and the world beyond it. By talking about my own hurdles and challenges, I hope to shed light on the challenges that face people like me who come from backgrounds that require some catching. If I succeed, then, having learned from my mistakes, these young people will have more time and energy to put toward making the most of their college experiences.
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