The day of my high school graduation felt so surreal—I had accomplished what had for most of my life seemed impossible. I had graduated high school and was fortunate enough to have secured a full ride to my dream school. I beamed with joy and pride as I turned my tassel alongside my friends, and in that moment I felt nearly invincible, as if I had achieved my very own fairy tale ending.
However, as the cliché line from multiple high school graduation speeches goes, it was merely the beginning of another chapter.
For my close friends and I, being a first-generation college student goes side by side with our Hispanic heritage. Most of our parents struggle with the language barrier and the differences between the education system here and where they grew up. This summer we quickly realized that the hardships that accompany being the first in your family to go off to college had not stayed behind in the days of the college and scholarship application process. Indeed, they have followed us to the moments that we face now as we prepare to begin our freshman year. Moments where we have to send in paperwork for financial aid, student health insurance and other administrative rules and procedures that have to take place before move-in day.
We understand that our parents would gladly help us with the paperwork if they could, and though by now we have come to terms with the fact that we simply face a little more responsibility than our peers as we navigate our way towards a better future, I know that there are still times when we wish we could turn to them for advice.
It is something that mostly goes by unspoken of, because perhaps we feel that allowing ourselves to “complain” about our situation is ungrateful when our parents have loved and supported us in the ways they could. But I’m allowing myself to admit that there have been moments when I felt distanced from my parents because I wasn’t able to explain well enough or they weren’t able to understand well enough what I was going through or dealing with as I tried to navigate a system that wasn’t exactly built for people like me, and I think that's normal.
After all, being a first generation college student isn’t just about the success story that seems like it’s forced to be. By simply identifying yourself as a first-generation college student it is automatically implied that you succeeded and persevered, and while those things might be true, the painting of things as success stories sometimes overshadows the fact that the story isn’t over and that the struggle continues.
When I identify myself as a first-generation college student, I think of myself trying to explain to my parents what AP classes and ACT tests were. I think of the members of my community who told my parents to “not be fooled” by my apparent academic success, that college had been impossible for their kids and would be impossible for me too. I think of the late nights where I was the only one awake in the house, with a throbbing headache as I tried to fill out my CSS Profile.
I say these things not because I want sympathy or praise, but because I feel that sometimes the label of “first-gen” is glamorized in a way that takes away from the actual stories of students. With every statistic from an institution that boasts of having a certain number of first-gens, the differing stories and obstacles faced by those students is compiled into a single number.
Our journeys are just beginning, but I know that my friends and I will continue to face countless obstacles as we continue to make our way through a path that is mostly unknown territory for us. We will face those new obstacles with the same resilience and determination that allowed us to overcome the ones we had to face to get to this point. We will reach out to each other from Durham to Chapel-Hill, to Greensboro and Greenville, to Raleigh and Philadelphia and Virginia, the places where we have spread ourselves out to obtain higher education, expanding the web of support that we weaved together throughout the hardest moments of high school.
