- We close with an essay.
Novelist, Jennine Capo
Crucet, grew up in Miami
and attended Cornell
University in upstate New York.
In addition to adjusting
to the cold Jennine learned
to navigate campus as a first
generation college student.
Tonight she shares thoughts
on why colleges need
to do better at welcoming
students like her.
- It took me going away
to college to learn
that by doing so I'd
become something called
a first generation college student.
This means I was the first in
my family to go to college,
but it also meant I had no
idea how much I didn't know.
For instance, my family
stuck around for all
of Freshman orientation
because the paperwork
about move-in day didn't explicitly state
when they should leave.
So, we assumed they needed
to be there the whole week.
Long after other families
had taken off mine was still
following me around as
I registered for classes
or during the school mandated swim tests.
I was glad to have them
there, but it did make
for some awkward meals in the dining hall.
Aside from going to class I had no roadmap
for what I was supposed
to do as a newly minted
college student.
I navigated those first
weeks by carefully watching
what I thought of as real
students, those whose parents
had gone to college, who'd
gotten a lifelong rundown
of what was in store.
That's how I knew to wear
flip flops in the shower
or take notes in class or
that the visits to the writing
center were covered by tuition.
But, there was still a lot I
couldn't figure out this way.
For instance, I dropped
a class after realizing
the textbooks would cost
a couple hundred dollars.
By the time I learned that
professors often put books
on course reserve it was
too late to add it back
that semester, or like when
my professor kept saying,
see me in office hours as if
we all knew what that meant.
But, it took a bad grade on
a paper for him to explain
to me what office hours were.
He was just waitin'
around in one place ready
to answer all my questions.
What could my college have
done to show me how much
I needed to know without
making me feel dumb
or out of my league in the process?
This is where well meaning
administrators usually start
throwing around the word, mentorship.
But, too many colleges
still think of mentoring
as just meetings between
two people, one who knows
some stuff and another who
doesn't yet know that stuff.
Technically, I had a mentor
my first year at college,
but when I finally met him
he didn't seem to understand
how confused I was, in part
because he came from a long
line of college going folks.
He didn't know how much
I didn't know either.
Formal mentors, like the
one my college assigned me,
need to be first generation
college students themselves,
or have been trained by
people intimately familiar
with the challenges students like me face.
They need to do more than
send us concerned emails.
They need to knock on our
literal doors and they should
be compensated for their
work as mentors, not asked
to volunteer or serve out
of some sense of obligation
to help out a past version of themselves.
They need to be concretely
valued for the resource
they are, for the unique
survival skills they
bring to campus.
I now work as a novelist
and believe it our not,
a professor.
Whenever I'm in front of
a group of new readers
or students I ask those who
identify as first generation
college people to raise their hands.
I then congratulate them.
I tell them how much it
means to me to meet them
and I tell them that I'm one of them,
but later after whatever
talk or lecture I've given
there's almost always
someone who comes up to me
and admits they didn't raise
their hand because they
didn't know being a first
generation college student
was a fact they could be proud of.
Only then do I admit to
them something I know
that they don't.
When I was in their place
I wouldn't have raised
my hand either.
- You can find more of
our essays on our website
at pbs.org/newshour/essays.
