First-Generation College Student: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Being the first person in your family to go to college means navigating a system that was not designed with you in mind. Not with the assumption that you would be doing it without family members who had done it before you.
I know this from my own experience. My parents worked hard to support our family, but college was not part of their path. That meant that when I started thinking about higher education, I was mostly figuring it out on my own. I did not have someone at home who could tell me how to compare financial aid packages, what to look for in a research lab, what office hours were actually for, or why it mattered which professor taught a course rather than just which course I took.
Some of that I figured out along the way. Some of it I learned later than I should have. And some of it I am still learning to name clearly enough to pass on.
This post is for students who are navigating the same terrain.
You are not behind. You are working with less information.
The most important thing I want to say first is this: if college feels harder for you to navigate than it seems to for some of your peers, that is not evidence that you do not belong there. It is evidence that you are operating with less prior information than students whose families have been in these environments before.
That is a real and meaningful difference. It is not an intelligence gap. It is an information gap, and it is one that can be narrowed.
Understanding this distinction matters because the story you tell yourself about your difficulties shapes how you respond to them. A student who believes they are struggling because they are not smart enough tends to hide the struggle. A student who understands they are navigating unfamiliar systems with limited guidance tends to seek out information. One of those responses leads somewhere useful.
On the things nobody tells you
There are things that feel obvious to people who grew up in families where college was the expected path. These things are often not obvious at all to people who did not.
Office hours exist, and you should use them. This sounds simple. Most first-generation students dramatically underuse office hours, partly because the idea of approaching a professor with questions feels presumptuous, and partly because no one explained that office hours are specifically set aside for this purpose. Professors expect to see students during office hours. Going does not signal weakness — it signals engagement.
Grade point averages are not everything, and they are also not nothing. The students who navigate college most successfully tend to understand when to prioritize a grade and when to prioritize an experience — a research opportunity, a challenging course in a subject they care about, a relationship with a mentor. Learning how these trade-offs work takes time, and the calculus is different depending on what you want to do after college.
Your major does not determine your future as rigidly as it might seem from inside it. This is genuinely not obvious when you are twenty years old choosing a major. Many of the assumptions students make about how their undergraduate major maps to their career are either inaccurate or far more flexible than they believe. Exploring this question directly — by talking to people in fields you are curious about — is more useful than trying to reason it out from the course catalogue.
Financial aid is worth understanding in detail. This is uncomfortable for many students, but the financial architecture of college — grants, loans, work-study, outside scholarships — is something you can learn to navigate, and the difference between a well-informed and a poorly-informed approach to financial aid compounds over time. Your financial aid office is a resource. Scholarships are more available than most students realize.
On imposter syndrome
At some point during your college experience, you will probably wonder whether you actually belong there. This feeling has a name: imposter syndrome. It is remarkably common among first-generation college students, and among many other students as well.
The feeling is not evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence that you are in an environment that feels unfamiliar, and your brain is interpreting unfamiliarity as danger. Research on first-generation students specifically has found that universities structured around assumptions of prior exposure to academic culture can create what researchers describe as a mismatch between institutional expectations and students' own frameworks. A structural gap, not a personal failing.
This does not mean the feeling goes away through willpower alone. But it is worth knowing that most of your peers, including ones who appear confident and at ease, have their own version of this experience. Belonging in a new environment is something that develops with time and evidence — and the evidence accumulates through exactly the kind of engagement that imposter syndrome tends to discourage: asking questions, seeking mentors, contributing to conversations even when you are uncertain.
What I would tell my earlier self
If I could go back and say something to myself at the beginning of this process, it would be this: you are not supposed to already know how this works. Nobody starts out knowing how it works. The students who navigate it most successfully are not the ones who already had all the information — they are the ones who figured out how to ask for it.
That means building relationships with people who know things you do not know yet. It means treating your own uncertainty as a starting point for learning rather than a reason to stay quiet. And it means being honest with yourself about what you need, even when asking for help feels harder than it should.
Being a first-generation student is not a disadvantage to overcome. It is a specific experience that has given you things — perspectives, tenacity, an understanding of what it costs to try for something unfamiliar — that are genuinely worth something, in college and beyond.
The goal is not to become someone who looks like they never had to figure any of this out. The goal is to become someone who did figure it out, and who can help the people behind them do the same.
That, in the end, is part of what brought me to this work.
Sources
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006
Stephens, N. M., Fryberg, S. A., Markus, H. R., Johnson, C. S., & Covarrubias, R. (2012). Unseen disadvantage: How American universities' focus on independence undermines the academic performance of first-generation college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1178-1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027143
