As a first-gen student, I've always known that other students with legacies in academia or family histories of college education have inherent advantages over me, but I don't think I've ever been able to see and understand that as clearly as today.
Picture this, August 2022, I am trying to write my diss at a cafe with the looming presence of the job market approaching; sitting in front of me, what I assume to be a mother-daughter duo (aunt/niece? they look related but who knows), working on college applications.
Yes, I am totally eavesdropping, but come on, how else am I supposed to learn about this stuff? I am the first person in my family to ever finish high-school and go to college, and neither one of my parents even went to high-school. They were both working at 14 in factories.
And I know I had lots of privilege too -- no siblings to take care of (I am the youngest); although I would sometimes work night shifts with my mom, I never had to work a full-time job while going to school; I had access to a free library; my mom loved that I loved school, etc.
Anyway-- this duo has been working for hours on college applications and the help this kid is receiving is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It's not just mere passive knowledge about what universities want or expect, but so much skill-building!
The mother/aunt printed a calendar and is making her daughter/niece write down every deadline for every college. She is then teaching her how to back-plan and pick days one week/two weeks/a month prior to each deadline to work on specific parts of these apps.
She also just knew grants, scholarships, and fellowships on top of her head, remembering how her, her husband, or cousin so-and-so received one and yeah, it's "not a lot, just 3000$ but apply to everything and some of these places just /give/ you money if you ask"
Reviewing the kid's CV (and don't even get me started on how privileged they both needed to be to do all of the things listed on her CV), she systematically identified additional categories to list, from spiritual work (aka going to church) to "cultural competence" from traveling
She is now proof-reading all of her cover letters with extreme skills and an acute eye (at least in my opinion), not just correcting but extensively explaining the logic behind cover letter writing and making sure her daughter understands the basic structure behind the document
For context, my mother calls me every time she has to write a letter or even a postcard, and this started when I was in middle-school. I wrote her CV and cover letters for jobs and prep her every time she has an important phone call with French retirement or health offices
Right now, she is literally teaching tricks to the teenager like, "use present tense here, it will make them believe you are still doing it" or "say you distributed the profits to charities, they love that stuff" citing the college apps of other family members as proof it worked
She is also telling the kid to talk about charity work that she [the mother/aunt] herself has done and to say that she took the lead on these initiatives, with sentences like "I led a project with my local church that resulted in half a million dollars donated to charities"
As a high-schooler, I don't think I could even grasp what 1000 of any money was, let alone half a million. I couldn't do more than one extra-curricular activity because everything was too costly (and I know many who couldn't even do that) and it couldn't require any equipment.
Anyway, I feel like I have learned more about apps and writing CVs/cover letters from eavesdropping on these two strangers than ever before in my life. I know it's "common knowledge" for so many in academia but I need you all to sit and grasp the privilege behind all of that.
I know it's not new info and others have thought about first-gen stuff more deeply and compellingly than I ever could. But I really think I couldn't grasp how behind or hindered I started this race until seeing so clearly how much of a headstart this kid is getting
Plus remember, we're just in August and nothing is due until November; this kid already has full drafts of everything she needs for every app. There was never any free time or energy in my family to start working on things so ahead of time
Ok, I'm done. I just really needed to share all of this; it is just so easy to feel ashamed because I "should know" or guilt because of every sacrifice it took for me to get here, and the gaslighting that everything is merit-based is so strong y'all.
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