First-generation college students often face challenges with college readiness, familial support, financial stability and, once enrolled, adjusting to college life, according to a study published by Innovation Showcase. At Niche, we’re chatting with first-gen students about how they became the first in their families to attend college. Their stories are at once awe-inspiring and eye-opening, familiar-feeling yet very much their own. Let’s listen. 

Not just for the rich.

Ivy League schools are historically considered to be only available to the wealthy.

Countless times after getting into Princeton, I heard people from my small hometown come to me and say that I was making a huge mistake for how much debt I would inevitably find myself in.

This, of course, is untrue.

In recent decades, educational equity has become far more important at these institutions, considering things such as race, gender and class. Nowadays, admissions are need-blind, and aid is spectacular, allowing most students to graduate debt-free.

Choosing Princeton last spring ended up being a no-brainer based on price alone.

It was significantly cheaper than every other school that had accepted me, including a state school.

As a first-generation, low-income student, price had to be a major deciding factor. Luckily, Princeton was a dream come true for me, so I had no problems with attending. Though I was receiving great aid I continued to search for other scholarship opportunities that would help to cover the remaining costs, and I earned a few.

So far, this experience had been really rewarding; being a first-generation student meant I had to teach myself about the application process more than any outside source I had. It could be confusing and overwhelming at times, so finding success with admissions and scholarships made me feel like my hard work had finally paid off.

Of course, money remained a concern.

The cost of attending was manageable, but I had yet to buy a laptop, supplies for my dorm, textbooks or anything else that I needed for college. These expenses would obviously add up. When I found out that I would not be able to live on campus this past semester, I also wanted to find off-campus housing, which requires a lot of spending on rent and groceries.

I had practiced good saving habits throughout high school, so I had enough to get me through the semester. Even better, I spent some time looking through Princeton’s financial aid sites and found that they would help provide funding for the costs of off-campus living, as well as allowing me to use my outside scholarships for my technology purchases. Obtaining these funds was fairly quick and painless.

All in all, money problems ended up not being a huge concern for me during my first semester at Princeton.

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Life is just… different.

Income alone is not what separated me from my peers, however.

My family’s household income was typical where I grew up; I’m from a very rural area where the vast majority of people fall in the category of low-income. Because of this, the lifestyle that I have grown accustomed to is just different from that of my peers.

I had already anticipated this, but I did not realize all of the ways in which we would be different. It offered a lot of good talking points when making friends, as it can be funny to discuss the lengthy distances we travel to get to a grocery store or to mention that I was late getting somewhere because a cow was blocking the road.

Other things are less funny though, and more isolating.

The way I feel about spending money, how I interact with my family, the people I am used to associating with, and my living situation in general seems starkly contrasted against everybody else I have met thus far.

This is not necessarily problematic, but it came as a big surprise to me. I knew we would all have different backgrounds, but after knowing everybody I graduated with for the entirety of my life and sharing all of my experiences with the same few people, I was not very sure what “different backgrounds” would really look like in action.

I have since grown more used to this aspect of things, but in the beginning of the semester I was rather unprepared.

After making a few friends and hearing about the way they grew up, I realized there was even more to our differences.

In wealthier, more populated areas there seemed to be a lot more opportunities for things like volunteer work, extracurriculars, college preparation and more. I grew up wishing my high school had better funding for music, a bigger selection of AP classes and more sports to choose from. These were things I knew were more common at many high schools, and my area just made mine into an oddball.

Still, knowing that a lot of my fellow students had grown up with all the things I wished I had access to, were better prepared to apply to schools like Princeton, and had known that their chances of getting in were fairly high made me feel like I was utterly behind.

Most people that I have talked to know people who graduated from their high school in the past four years going to Princeton or somewhere similar, while for me, the Ivy League sounded like some unattainable myth until up to just a year-and-a-half ago. Sometimes these major differences between myself and my peers have made me feel out of place.

Diversity for the win.

Having said all that, the one thing I most looked forward to when planning to attend Princeton University was the array of new, diverse perspectives I would come across from the people I would meet.

Clearly, even through a virtual setting, I have not been disappointed.

I was also hoping to meet new people that would share more of my interests and values than those I grew up with. Despite our different backgrounds, my peers and I have proven to still have many commonalities that help to bring us together and have allowed me to be successful in making several meaningful friendships.

Though I was not entirely prepared for the specific ways in which I was different from my friends and classmates, I am still grateful for those differences. The past few months have provided special experiences for me that promoted a lot of personal growth.

I am learning many new things about myself and the rest of the world, and because of that, I am especially glad for this past semester and excited for those to come.

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