Wednesday, November 4, 2015 // The Statement
6B
“We know that students who are first-gen students enter
college less prepared,” she added. “We know that students are
often unfamiliar with the culture and the mechanics of col-
lege life and they don’t have family members who they can
call and ask questions. And we know that they tend to have
more complex family structures and that pulls their attention
and their time away from their work.”
***
Sanders didn’t begin identifying as a first-generation stu-
dent until she arrived at the University in September, but she
knows that it has always affected her.
Sanders said being at the University has been different
than undergrad because her cohort for her Master’s in Pub-
lic Policy program is so much smaller — about 100 students
per class. She knows her classmates more than she did at the
UT Austin. But she said overall, the experience has been less
welcoming. For example, when she made an announcement
in class one day about an upcoming first-gen meeting, no one
seemed to care.
“People would have side conversations with me about it,
and some people would ‘come out’ about them being first-gen,
but at the moment, it felt like dead silence,” she said. “It was
more like, ‘Oh, poor Cortney.’ ”
Similarly, Rackham student Aubrey Schiavone also didn’t
identify as first-generation until she got to the University.
She’s a student in the joint program between English and edu-
cation.
Schiavone got her bachelor’s from Mount Saint Mary’s
University, a Catholic school in Maryland of just under 2,500
students, and her master’s degree at Salisbury University, a
public school also near her hometown of Lanham, Maryland.
At both schools, coming from a working class background was
pretty normal.
Then, she moved to Ann Arbor.
“It was really hard when I moved here,” she said. “I hated
Ann Arbor when I first got here. In my eyes, everyone here
was rich and wealthy and I didn’t trust them. Mostly, I had
interacted with working class people and middle class peo-
ple.”
Schiavone got more in touch with her first-generation
identity when she found herself unable to afford basic neces-
sities like rent and required books — she had never felt so out
of place before. She found the first-generation undergraduate
student group during her second year, as well as the Rackham
first-generation group.
“It was helpful to know that there are students like me
here,” she said. “I was still hard for me to say, I’m first-gen and
I’m not fitting in here and I’m not experiencing it well.”
Similarly, Sanders was the first one in her family to leave
Houston to attend college and the first one to go out of state,
too. Since Sanders began college, two of her cousins and her
niece have all enrolled, too — and her niece is out of state, at a
school in Ohio. She thinks that she has played a role in making
this happen.
“I am a trailblazer,” she said. “I am making lives better
because, for the first time, I can give tangible evidence to say,
I graduated from here, given my circumstances.”
***
Schiavone’s dissertation is focused on how being a working
class and first-generation student affects how students read,
write, and communicate. She remembers one lecture distinct-
ly that made her think a lot about the subject.
“One day in class, we read this article called Kitchen Tables
and Rented Rooms,” she said. “It was all about how people do
reading and writing, literacy that matters, outside of schools,
and a lot of it was about working class people who were writ-
ing at their kitchen tables, for the jobs or for fun or because
they were going back to school.”
Schiavone said this was strikingly familiar to her — her
mother is a secretary, and her father is a mailman. Both of
them love to read and write in their spare time, but she says
that their literacy skills aren’t valued because they didn’t go
to college.
“I was so uncomfortable that we were talking about people
like me, people like my family,” she said. “There is the assump-
tion that the kind of people we study, the kind of people who
are working class and poor, aren’t in the room.”
Schiavone is interviewing fifteen first-generation, work-
ing-class undergraduates for her study. She focuses a lot of her
interviews on their writing and speaking practices.
“How we communicate with other people has a lot to do
with how we are perceived,” she said. “I have this inkling that
people who are first-gen and working class write and speak
a little bit differently than people who aren’t, and they write
and speak in ways that are very much informed by their back-
grounds and their upbringings.”
However, Schiavone was quick to emphasize that first-gen-
eration students have unique strengths.
“A lot of research done on first-generation students is about
the difficulties they face,” she said. “But I also want to ask stu-
dents about what their strengths are, and what they are doing
differently and are celebrating about their experience.”
For example, most of Schiavone’s research participants
have one or more jobs on and off campus, something often
seen as a weakness because it takes time away from academ-
ics. But these students are also gaining from such experiences.
“They are having this professional development while they
are in college that other students aren’t getting,” she said.
“They’ll say that ‘I work in a cafe, or in an office, and I have to
learn how to talk to customers and clients.’ This is an impor-
tant skill that your career is going to demand of you after col-
lege.”
***
Social Work masters student Christina Castillo has a bit
of a different story. Castillo transferred to the University in
2013, when she was 28. At the time, her daughter, Miranda,
was five. Castillo is a single mom.
Castillo is from an impoverished neighborhood in San
Diego. Her grandparents immigrated from Mexico, and never
went to school. Her mom didn’t go to college, either.
Castillo went to community college on and off for several
years and also struggled with domestic violence and men-
tal illness. Her daughter was born in 2007; later on, Castillo
graduated with her associates degree as a Phi Beta Kappa and
with highest honors. As her daughter was nearing kindergar-
ten, Castillo found herself on public assistance, and she knew
that she wanted to give her a better life.
“I was applying to jobs that I hated and didn’t want, and I
knew there was not going to be a future,” she said. “Mainly,
the decision was for my kid. I knew I wanted a better life for
her, and I knew whatever she saw, she would repeat in her life.
College is important and I wanted her to have that value.”
So in August 2013, Castillo and her daughter got on a train
that took them from San Diego to Los Angeles, and from Los
Angeles to Chicago. From Chicago, they took a bus to Ann
Arbor. It was her first time setting foot in Michigan.
“We came here with two suitcases and that was it,” she
said. “(We) moved into the apartment and slept in the clothes
we had. We had no blankets, no nothing.”
Now, she says, Miranda is in second grade and constantly
tells her that she’s going to go to the University one day, too.
“She was, many times, on campus with me going to class-
es,” Castillo said. “She just got into kindergarten when I start-
ed. It was the hardest thing of my life. I had to take her to my
classes sometimes because there wasn’t a babysitter. Some-
times teachers, I think, forget that there are students that are
not young and not single and have other obligations.”
Castillo said the experience has been positive for her
daughter, too, because the Ann Arbor Public Schools are
among the best in the state.
Although Castillo’s experience as a single mom affected
her experience at the University, being a first-generation col-
lege student has, too.
“When I first came here, I honestly felt like the stupidest
person in the world,” she said. “They would be talking about
concepts I never heard of. People will say things like, for
spring break, I went to Brazil, and I’m like, as a first genera-
tion, I’m barely cutting it, eating ramen noodles. You feel like
you’re getting same education but starting off on a different
playing level.”
***
Schiavone said the biggest message she wants to send to
people at the University is that these students need mentors.
“They need mentors who are empathetic, and that can
advocate for them, and who they can identify with,” she said.
Schiavone said because being a first-generation student is
an often invisible identity, students and faculty should not be
afraid to speak up about it. When she finally did, she found
three mentors who were also first-gen.
“If you’re a professor on campus here, if you’re a grad stu-
dent or undergraduate who is first-gen, start saying it,” Schia-
vone said. “Say it out loud, and celebrate it.”
INFOGRAPHIC BY JAKE WELLINS