Fish out of Water: Voices of First-gen, Low-income, and/or Rural Students

Ciel: Hi, I’m Ciel, and I have a complicated relationship with AU.

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The academics are great, the SIS program is everything I hoped it would be, and I love having access to so many opportunities in DC. I even love that we don’t have a football team. But at the same time, I’ve really struggled to feel at home here. I remember moving into Hughes Hall in fall 2021 and being so taken aback by how different everything felt. Even the way people dressed was completely different than what I was used to in my rural town. I saw fashion styles and brands that I had only ever seen online, and that was the first time it hit me that here, everything about my life was going to be completely different. Aside from just getting used to urban life, I was now surrounded by some of the wealthiest people in the country, a far cry from the poverty-stricken Appalachian county I came here to escape. This feeling of “otherness” only worsened in my classes, where I felt like the rotten apple of the bunch every time my professors explained assignments by calling them “Model UN-esque.” As someone who went to an extremely underfunded high school that didn’t even have a debate team, this meant nothing to me, and I was too ashamed to ask my peers for help because I saw how most of them jumped at the chance to do something familiar, something they already understood how to do. I also felt behind in my knowledge of world history, so I tried to reach out to a professor for help. I told him how isolated and behind I felt and was told to pay more attention to the news, which I don’t blame him for suggesting, but that solution did nothing to combat the imposter syndrome I was beginning to develop. Today, I’m in my third year at AU, yet I still feel the same way: isolated and behind. This entire experience led me to wonder, do other students at AU feel isolated and inadequate like me, or am I just not cut out for this?  What I found was a much more complicated story, and I realized that my struggles as a rural student were only the tip of iceberg for many other students here. AU reports that over 10% of the student body identifies as first-gen, and while almost 70% of the student body comes from the top 20% of Americans, there are still plenty of low-income students that attend AU, so I decided to talk to students who identify as first-gen, low-income, and/or rural to and find out what it’s like for them at an institution like this.

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Ciel: I first spoke to Braedon, an AU senior from Nampa, Idaho, studying philosophy and political science and asked him if he’s been able to find community he can relate with here.

Braedon: Oh no. No, no. Let me tell you what. I knew during my second year, based off an interaction I had with some friends who worked in the admissions department, that I was the only person from Idaho here.

Ciel: Braedon also talked about his transition to AU from Idaho.

Braedon: It was really hard. Still is, to some extent. There are a lot of things that I appreciated. Not having to drive half an hour to get just about anywhere was something I appreciated. So, all of the amenities of a city that every farm hick sort of fantasizes about were all the things I appreciated. But it was overwhelming to some extent. I would say the biggest transition was the people. I really didn’t know how to, like, relate to people that…like I said, we had developed our own sort of scale of wealth. That got turned on its head really fast, and I realized, “I’m not middle class.” And the people I thought were wealthy, might not have even been middle class either. So, it’s really hard. I have a joke that if I meet another person from New Jersey, I’m going to die. As people who travel a lot, who go on vacations, whose parents are paying for their education.  That’s a big one. Sallie Mae has paid for my education, as well as Pell grant benefits and that sort of stuff.  So people who just like, have never been on welfare, have never experienced insecurity in whether or not they’re going to go to school the next year. That’s like, the overwhelming majority of people here, who’ve lived an entirely different kind of life from me. So I began to feel this sort of like, this insecurity that I used debt and a huge amount of need-based scholarships to sort of propel myself into one class ahead and for the rest of my life nobody is ever going to really get the realities of coming from a place of poverty, which is difficult. But you know, [there’s] a lovely public transit system.

Ciel: I also spoke to one of my best friends from Appalachia, Ariel, who is currently a third-year student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville studying foreign affairs and Japanese language and literature. She told me about how she felt her background as a first-gen, low-income, and rural student affected her transition to the prestigious UVA.

Ariel: I would say it definitely made it more difficult because I didn’t have an impression of college going into it, and I didn’t know what to expect. And I also didn’t have very much guidance, and when I got to UVA it was kind of like a culture shock because most of the student body here is incredibly wealthy or at least very well off, and a large percentage of our students are from Northern Virgina, which has some of the richest countries in the United States. So, it just really felt like even though a lot of these people are from the same state that I am, we just had such wildly different experiences growing up, and therefore a lot of our perspectives were different. Another thing is the attitude that people here have toward people from my area. I’ve had more than one person say, “Oh, I’m surprised you can read.” And things like that. Those are just things that no one would ever say back home. And there are just certain things that people from low-income areas are more sensitive to. And so that’s another thing like, socially I really struggled with at first was learning how to interact with people who will just say things like that, and try not to take it too personally.

Ciel: The struggles of this massive geographic and cultural transition can be exacerbated by another major change: transitioning from a high school designed to put people directly into the workforce to an elite academic institution with a rigorous workload.

Ariel: I will say maybe I had one or two classes in high school that I felt prepared me for college. But, you know, a lot of people at UVA talk about the IB program and how that took work for them and took a lot of effort, and I don’t feel like we had anything to compare that to in Southwest Virginia. The AP classes I took were almost all exclusively online with teachers from Northern Virginia or just other parts of Virginia in general because we did not have a lot of…we had like, one in-house AP teacher, and she’s no longer there. She went on to teach at a college. So I guess that it’s just so much more difficult to access academically rigorous classes in Southwest Virginia, and I think that definitely puts you at a disadvantage.

Braedon: I took what I could, basically, and it was enough to get me here. But yeah, the resources were a little limited, and my parents were not much help. Neither of them went to college. Only one of them graduated high school. So I kind of just had to, by my 17-year-old self, lonesome, figure out how to apply to schools and do that.

Ciel: This “figuring out” on your own doesn’t end with applications. Just think about all the terms we take for granted as common knowledge in higher education. Work study, office hours, majors and minors, faculty, course sections, credit hours. The list goes on and on. Ferris State University has actually compiled an alphabetized list of such terms to help first-gen students, and the list is 98 items long. 98. What about the services university campuses typically provide, like academic coaching, affinity organizations, student health, academic advising, and writing centers? What does any of this even mean to someone without an experienced parent or adult to rely on?

Ciel: Azzami, another good friend of mine who recently graduated with her psychology degree from AU, shared her struggles with this “hidden curriculum.”

Azzami: You also don’t have like, any support. Like I had a lot of peers who could call their parents, which is still so funny to me that they could just like, call their parents and ask them questions about like, history or something about law or psychology, and they could just pick up the phone and their parents would summarize something for them. That was so baffling to me because I didn’t have that at all. Or when I was having issues with financial aid, like it was 100% on me to deal with that. It was 100% on me to deal with my medical expenses if I got sick. Like, I would go to the doctor hardly ever. If I could avoid going to the doctor, I would just not go because everything fell on me completely. I was kind of alone in that. So coming to school for me was not just coming to school. It was being 100% independent, and I had to figure out my own finances and just everything. It was all on me.

Ciel: Azzami also talked about how being bilingual made her struggles with hidden curriculum even worse, especially when professors used complicated vocabulary and jargon.

Azzami: And also, I spoke a lot of Spanish growing up. I didn’t speak English most of the time at home. So again, just with the whole vocabulary thing, like there are a lot of words that I don’t know in English that I might know in Spanish. So their use of certain kind of vocabulary definitely kind of made my life more difficult.

Ciel: So much more difficult in fact, that Azzami decided to change programs. The jargon wasn’t the only issue though. A common theme I noticed in my interviews was the obstacles that SPA and SIS in particular present to disadvantaged students.

Azzami: I did come to AU as a poly sci major, which I was initially really excited about. And I changed my major after one semester because I did not feel like I could do it. I sat in my intro level classes and it was the same thing. It was just professors assuming that we all came in with this background knowledge that I did not have. And I was literally looking at the syllabus as they would say, “Oh I’m not going to go over this because you guys already know what you’re talking about,” and the class would have these discussions about it, and everybody knew what was going on. Yet I would sit there, having no idea what was going on, like what they were talking about, and I would sit there waiting for this professor to go over the things that he said he was going to go over, and then he just decided not to because most of the class already knew. So that, it made me feel dumb, honestly. So I decided to switch over to a major I thought would be easier, which was psych. No offense psych. And yeah, it was honestly really disappointing. I still kind of think about that and how that’s affected me, and I do wish that I could go back and not let it scare me. But yeah, that was ultimately what led to my major change, was feeling like I couldn’t handle it. Because everyone in my classes especially, like their parents were lawyers or they were going to become lawyers and they knew exactly what they needed to do to get there, and I was still figuring it out, so it just felt really, really scary, and I ran away from poly sci.

Braedon: The thing is, SPA and SIS both are very large schools, which means they have a lot of resources but those resources are often divvied out on the basis of obscure programs that you can dig into if you have the support. But your professors are not part of a small cohort of professors at all. They are teaching a lot, and they don’t have significant reason to bond with students and guide them to those resources. Whereas other schools get much more limited resources but at the same time, each individual faculty member is very involved with that and so is not only able to but very keen on and actively tries to find students in need and accommodate that. So SPA has kind of its own thing. It’s an administration that is, unintentionally, more organized and as a result less accessible.

Ciel: I also spoke to Ken Knight, chair of AU’s Japanese language program, about college accessibility. Though he’s largely integrated into the world of academia now, Professor Knight is originally from southern Georgia and was a first-gen student at Temple University. He told me his thoughts on the quote-unquote traditional university approach.

Knight: I don’t think it’s very useful anymore. Really don’t. Because it wouldn’t help me when I was a student, at all…When I was an undergrad, I used to mispronounce things because I didn’t know how to read them properly. I’d only read them in books. Like, Sartre…I got laughed at for saying “Sar-trey” or something like that one time. You can sound like a fool just because there’s no way you could be exposed to that. I mean, not in my family. There’s no way.

Ciel: This constant barrage of new language and information is understandably very overwhelming for first-gen students, particularly those who are also low-income. Not only are they having to learn what is essentially a new language for classes, but they’re also struggling to navigate a wildly different social environment, namely, the world of the white and rich.

Ciel: Did your identity make you feel isolated at AU?

Azzami: Yeah, 100%. Because most of my friends are white…I mean all of my friends are white. So those were like, my friend group are the people I feel like I connected with the most, and even then it’s been super hard sharing some of my struggles, especially when it comes to balancing school and work. I feel like not a lot of people can totally relate to that. So I definitely did feel isolated in a lot of different senses.

Ciel: I mean I remember that because I feel like the whole time we’ve been in college you’ve been the only one who’s been working.

Azzami: Yeah, and I also get FOMO. I feel like I missed out on so much, and like, I would be at work just watching everyone’s stories and just thinking about it. Or thinking about all the events that I missed, or say I was planning on going after work, sometimes I wouldn’t make it because I was just too tired.

Braedon: People would often say, “Well, I’m from New York, and yes, my family makes $100,000-$200,000 income a year, but I’m middle class because it’s New York, and rent is so expensive or mortgages are so expensive and groceries are so expensive. But for me it’s like, you get what you pay for, right? What Idaho has in affordability it makes up for in extremely poor education and a complete lack of opportunity. And food deserts, sometimes in “desert” deserts which is fun. And what they have in expensive housing and groceries and products and travel, they more than make up for in excellent education and opportunities, a community of educated individuals, safety in many cases. Their lives are measurably better. So for me, for somebody to say “yes I make a lot more money but I live in a state that’s more expensive” and to pull a “I’m middle class” from that is one of my biggest frustrations. And it’s in part representative of that fact that at school, everyone is quote-unquote middle-class. They’re not, but nobody can conceive of themselves as anything other than that.

Ciel: As I mentioned earlier, almost 70% of AU’s student body comes from families in the top 20% of income earners in America. But students are not the only extremely wealthy people this school. It’s the professors too. Professor Knight told me about how his conversations with fellow faculty tend to go.

Knight: So what happens is, and this happened today. I was talking with a guy who is a new friend of mine here. We were talking about our experiences, and this guy has lived in various countries, family’s living in various interesting places like London and others. And I said, “Yeah, I went to England on a KC-135 when I was sleeping on top of the cargo boxes. You know, because it’s military, and that’s how you travel, on what’s called a MAC flight. And so, that’s how I got there. I never saw London, but I saw REF bases. And it’s just a totally different experience. There’s no similarity at all, really. I can tell you a lot of things about a B-52, because I’ve been in them. But, you know, I cannot tell you about a fancy boarding school in England. At all. And I’ve worked with people in Japan who grew up in England, and they went to those schools, and they talked about it with each other, and that was something that I could not share in.

Ciel: So not only are low-income and first-gen students isolated from their peers, but also their professors. Going to college is already daunting, and feeling ostracized from the entire community makes students feel like they have to fight alone.

Braedon: Almost in the same way as back home, I feel like I’ve had to figure out most of the stuff myself, and I’ve gotten pretty good at that, but sometimes I do wonder if things would be different if I had some basis of knowledge, some form of support, if I would’ve made different decisions or been smarter. But what’s done is done I guess. Support-wise the university tries, but if you’ve ever visited any university office trying to accomplish anything, you know that their best is not great. I’ll say that there has never been a year where I have not had to spend a couple hours in the financial aid office to figure out if I can go to school for the semester or not. As they don’t receive any of my scholarships or financial aid until significantly after tuition is due, as they sort of like, tell me the costs are one way then truthfully they’re not. So I’ve really had to develop a lot of self-sufficiency in ways that students who just have their parents pay for school don’t need to.

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Ciel: While there is no way to avoid most of the challenges these marginalized students face, there are things professors can do to make things a little easier and give students hope, but professors have to remember that these identities cannot be essentialized. Every student is coming in with a unique story and needs. During my conversations with Braedon, Ariel, Azzami, and Professor Knight, I did pick up on one major lesson though.

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Ciel: The importance of communicating with students about their lived experiences and potentially incorporating them into class in a meaningful and respectful way.

Knight: I think what you have to do is, you have to have students share their own experiences somehow. And be able to incorporate it into the class. So you have to ask them and get them to share it in a way that is respectful. I think that’s very difficult for a lot of people, because you know, these people are also Ivy League people, so they might not have those experiences. They might be embarrassed to talk about that sort of lifestyle in front of other people. They might think like, “Oh, I don’t want to embarrass this person.”

Ariel: I did have a politics professor and we were talking…it was a political economy class, and we were talking about food deserts and things like that, and I said, “actually I grew up in a food desert.” You know, limited options for groceries and dining and just like, food in general being kind of a challenge for some people to access. And he started bringing it up in class as an example like, continuously, and he made an effort to check in with me and make sure I was okay with him bringing up my circumstances in class, and I was like yeah it’s fine. I think it was just like, very uncommon for him to be able to say like, “Oh look, it’s real, there’s someone who has had that experience.” So that was, you know, both like surprising but also I appreciated what seemed like a genuine interest in my personal circumstances growing up. Especially in a class that had a lot of econ majors and stuff.

Ciel: As you just heard, Ariel’s experience talking about her background in a food desert was done respectfully and with her consent, both of which I cannot stress the importance of enough when it comes to talking about potentially traumatic subjects in class. We can’t just talk about these subjects like they’re far away from the realities of anyone in the class, because there’s pretty good chance they’re not.

Azzami: And that’s what was so ironic about my psych classes was that we would read about these examples, and you know, we would see the signs almost. And then we would have discussions, and it felt like my peers were kind of insensitive to those things. The way they would talk about things…and it was right in front of me, and they just could not…they could not see it. And it was right in front of them! So it was very, very ironic for sure. Or even in poly sci. You know you talk about the justice system, you talk about disparity and wage gaps, knowledge gaps. And again, right in front of you. The professors are teaching it, yet they’re skipping over things without thinking about the fact that one of these students could be in their classroom.

Ciel: Professors can also help by forming real relationships with students, which can be even better for them than just acknowledging their experiences in class.

Ariel: I think that honestly the most helpful thing my professors did for me was just extending kindness and being willing to get to know me.

Braedon: The way that I managed to quote-unquote get out is by making connections with my teachers…I think that’s continued here. Granted, the atmosphere is very different. There are like, higher expectations, but my ability to connect with professors has probably been one of the shining points. Maybe not based off my background because even the professors are full of people who generally couldn’t understand that. But they are full of people who recognize that the reason I’m here is because I have a passion for certain topics…So I think that I’ve really connected with some professors, who have offered me jobs and offered me support for my intended path. But I think that they would definitely only be able to express sympathy rather than empathy with respect to understanding any of the complicated dimensions. Like they’re sensitive to it, but they certainly couldn’t relate to it.

Ciel: So even if professors can’t fully understand a student’s experiences, these relationships can still be helpful when it comes to jobs, internships, and other projects, all of which can help alleviate some of the financial stress students are dealing with. Forming these relationships can also make students more comfortable reaching out for help from professors.

Azzami: Maybe make it a point that if participation is becoming an issue…I think there could be ways to make themselves more approachable to students who want to address that with them.

Ciel: Do you think it would be helpful for professors to directly reach out to students? Like with an email?

Azzami: Yeah, I’d like to say that. However, I do kind of think that to a certain degree, it is a a student’s own responsibility to kind of address that with their professors themselves if they’re feeling like maybe their participation isn’t the greatest. I do think it’s on the student a little bit to go to their professor, but I also think that the professor needs to create a safe space for that student. A lot of my professors didn’t necessarily make me feel like I could come to them with information like that. The few times that I did, I was kind of met with an attitude that felt like they didn’t really care because they couldn’t really understand why that was an issue.

Ciel: It’s also vital for instructors to understand how the motivations of their students differ so that they can better address students’ needs. Rural, first-gen, and low-income students, for instance, tend to have different motivations and goals when attending college than the average AU student. While privileged students may come here to jumpstart their careers and go on the classic early 20s journey of introspection, aka, finding yourself, disadvantaged students often come to college because they have a vision of economic success that isn’t a possibility in their hometown.

Knight: There were kids who were like, finding themselves, but I was not one of them at that point. I was very motivated and focused. I think of college in many ways as a ticket, you know. It’s a ticket to a new life, and some people get it and some people don’t. But what you do with that ticket is up to you, but it is a sort of ticket. You have that diploma. It’s basically like I was told. You have that diploma, so you can get a job now.

Braedon: Part of the joy of college is being able to stop and smell the roses and look around and try different classes, try different majors, but when you’re so cognizant of the cost, so cognizant of the time and trying to prove to yourself that you are just as good as the peers around you, worthy of being there despite everything, and already you’re trying to play catch up because your schools have never held you to any kind of standard until AU. And so you have to compete with, or you feel like you’re forced to compete with students who have gone to very advanced schools with high expectations that replicate the college experience very well…All these things makes you feel like you need to get locked in. I got locked in, and it was really hard to unlock myself in while being cognizant of the fact that I can’t just take another year like other people can.

Azzami: I came to AU to run away from everything I grew up seeing. All the cycles that would end in abuse or substance dependency, low-income jobs…people dying.

Ciel: And the physical stuff too, like when you work in agriculture and on the farms.

Azzami: Oh yeah, you see people who are 30 years old who look like they’re 50, and people getting back surgery because their bodies are just so messed up and they’re constantly in pain. I myself worked jobs before coming to AU, or like during school break, like winter break, summer break, I myself was working between 9 and 13 hour days sometimes, and I was wrecked. And people have to live off of that their entire lives where I’m from. So that’s definitely what I was running from. At least it’s been in my experience that you come to school with so much baggage, and you’re not just dealing with school. Like I didn’t have the privilege of just getting to sit in my classes and focus solely on the content that was being presented to me. There was a lot of dozing off thinking about things that may have happened to me, or kind of the things that I’m running away from or the things that I don’t want or it’s something that happened back home. So it’s like a loop in your head all the time of, oh you have to deal with school but I can’t because I’m not strong enough, I’m not smart enough, but you have to because that’s your only choice. Either that or you go home and pick fruit for living or work crazy hours at this job that you hate. So there’s definitely like, so much emotional and psychological baggage that you come with when attending a school like this for sure. Or just school in general as a first-gen student.

Ciel: These backgrounds can produce a powerful academic motivation that, if honed correctly, can make these students some of the best out there. Professors just have to meet them where they’re at first, especially in first-year classes. First-year classes are also the best time to introduce students to on-campus resources. As previously discussed, first-gen students may not be aware of the resources provided to them by the university, such as the first-gen student advisor. There’s also a student run first-gen student union. The lack of awareness is in part due to hidden curriculum, but also because a lot of the resources aren’t widely advertised.

Azzami: I didn’t know about any resources really. The only things that I knew about were usually student led organizations, but even that I had to find it on my own. Or I would just accidentally run into it. But in terms of resources provided to me by AU, I had really no knowledge of pretty much any.

Ciel: There’re several resources attached on the webpage for this podcast so that instructors can begin to educate themselves about AU’s resources for low-income and first-gen students. These resources can be included on syllabuses and other course materials, but it may be best to also mention them to students on the first day of classes.

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Ciel: So, now that we’ve discussed what professors can do to help, we need to address what behaviors are harmful and should be avoided. First and foremost, don’t remain ignorant of hidden curriculum. One of the linked resources is a very useful CTRL handout discussing best practices to make sure all students understand how the class will function. The handout highlights how crafting an equitable syllabus and communicating expectations both clearly and with room for questions can help students from all backgrounds succeed.

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Ciel: This leads into the next harmful behavior that professors should avoid: making broad assumptions of student knowledge and experience.

Ariel: I think that another helpful thing that professors have done is not assume everyone’s needs are the same and not assume everyone comes from the same background. I mean, I’ve had professors who do kind of operate on assumptions, like “oh maybe when you did this when you were in high school” or “you did this” or “you had this experience.” But for me, it’s been most helpful when professors kind of don’t those assumptions because it can feel like you’re getting a little bit left behind.

Ciel: Personally, I think part of the problem is that many professors are unaware of just how often they make these kinds of generalizing comments. I couldn’t even tell you how many times my first-year professors said, “Well, I’m sure you remember from APUSH that…” and I didn’t. I just sat there thinking, “What in the world is APUSH? Is it a club? An honor society?” I did eventually figure it out, so for anyone listening that also went to a school with no AP classes, APUSH is short for AP U.S. History. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know anything about U.S. History. I actually taught it to myself on Khan Academy and took the AP exam to boost my chances of getting into a good school like AU. I got a 4 on the exam, meaning I did know most of the content. I just didn’t know it by the name APUSH, so every mention of it served to remind me of the differences between myself and many of the students surrounding me. It made me feel isolated and like I wasn’t cut out to be here. Azzami had similar experiences with professors assuming all students are familiar with advanced high school curriculum.

Azzami: The most harmful thing I think was skipping the introductory things that, we should really like, know. I had a lot of professors who, because other students came in with a lot of knowledge and went to really good schools before AU, they kind of assumed that everyone came in with the same sort of background knowledge, and they would skip over a lot of super essential lectures. And I would monitor the syllabus and see the things that they were supposed to be going over, and then in class they would say, “Oh you guys already know what you’re talking about” or whatever, so they would skip over it, and I never really had access to that information just because it wasn’t presented to me. And obviously being the only one in the class that didn’t know about the subject already, I didn’t really want to speak up and ask them to go over it, so that was definitely the most harmful thing. I feel like I had to play catch-up when I hadn’t technically missed anything.

Ciel: Azzami touches on another important lesson here: underprivileged students are often doing their best to assimilate and otherwise “blend into” the AU community and may do everything in their power to prevent professors from discovering their background. When I asked Professor Knight if he can identify first-gen, low-income, or rural students in his classes, this is what he had to say.

Knight: They would never tell me. No. They would never let it show. I can tell for sure. Never. Because a lot of people feel like it’s shameful. They want to hide that, obviously. It’s shameful. It makes you appear ignorant just by virtue of poverty.”

Ciel: Azzami agreed with this description.

Azzami: Yeah for sure. You kind of fake it ‘til you make it, 100%. And like I said, I think that you have to play catch up a little bit, or just like, do extra research or prepare yourself a little bit more for the class just in case you’re called on or you have to participate in a discussion just so you have something to say. I would also sit in class and Google things as things are being said…I was constantly Googling stuff and just trying to make it seem like I knew what was going on when I actually had no clue.

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Ciel: To recap, rural, first-gen, and low-income students face numerous challenges when attending college, particularly at a more elite school like AU. The transition to college can be a jarring culture shock, elements of hidden curriculum abound, and lackluster high school education translates into feeling behind everyone else. To top it all off, these issues combined can lead to feelings of isolation. Professors can help these disadvantaged students by 1) communicating and incorporating their life experiences into class if appropriate, 2) forming meaningful relationships with students, 3) accounting for various motivations behind pursing an education, and 4) sharing relevant resources with students, especially in first-year classes. Finally, professors shouldn’t ignore the prevalence of hidden curriculum, make broad assumptions of student knowledge, or assume marginalized students will always come to instructors directly if they need help. One of the main points I want to convey here is that the first-gen, low-income, and rural struggles are not restricted to the classroom. These identities shape the entire college experience, and they shape it differently for every student. Obviously, professors cannot fix these issues for students, but by doing what is in their power to help, professors can lighten some of these burdens. I’ll leave you with some advice from Braedon.

Braedon: I think that what people ought to know is that our needs are variate and significantly different from each other’s, and from people of more wealthy or urban backgrounds, that whatever programs may be set up are deeply inaccessible to us. That merely directing us to those programs isn’t going to cut it. And at the end of the day, what is necessary is direct involvement. A sort of development of relationships beyond the level of a special first-gen advisor that has 400 other students. The programs that may be set up are not going to be as effective as individual relationships that can be formed, in part just by assessing both the challenges but then also the passions that we have. A first-gen student is ultimately going to be here for a reason. If a first-gen student is here, it’s because they have a vision for themselves, a goal, a future. Like, this isn’t just a way of finding themselves, it’s a very practical thing. I also think individual relationships can engage with a passion, like the drive that must necessarily bring a first-gen student here. And by engaging with that sort of humanize and connect with them on a level that they are not able to engage with like everybody else can. They feel like they’re here on a mission which means they have to be very practical but that mission is idealistic in a lot of ways. A vision of a better life, a passion for a particular topic, and that’s a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be squashed by the fact that we’re lower income, you know.