The power of first-generation

According to Forbes Advisor, about 56% of college students identify as first-generation, and these students are also more likely to come from low-income or minority backgrounds. Dr. Ciera Graham, who has over 11 years of experience in student affairs (such as college planning and career development), notes how first-generation college student graduates are more likely to earn less than their second-generation counterparts.

As a first-generation student, I have described how I encountered obstacles due to a lack of resources and learned to deal with feelings of imposter syndrome. However, the path of first-generation students is not all bleak. The label “first-generation” also signals ambition and resilience.

As a young girl, I knew college was an inevitable part of my future. At home, my parents reminded me how important good grades were for college and how college was essential for a financially secure future. In elementary school, the principal reminded us every day about the importance of college when she called us to chant the school pledge: “We learn lots so we can go to college!” I did not understand then what college was, but I knew I had to go to one.

However, the process of applying to college came with its own set of challenges. From the SAT to FAFSA, I was unfamiliar with these acronyms. I still remember, sprawled out on my living room floor, trying to figure out my parent’s tax information for the FAFSA. After hours of complaining, my mother took me to our neighbor’s house because their daughter was currently in college. Their daughter was more than willing to help. She explained how to make an account and find the number from my parent’s taxes.

First-generation students should not feel alone on their college journey, especially when they are in good company with notable figures like former First Lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In Michelle Obama’s Becoming, she recalls how her high school counselor tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because she did not look like “Princeton material.” Despite the counselor’s bruising words, Obama demonstrated ambition and strength as she became even more determined to get into Princeton.

In Sonia Sotomayor’s My Beloved World, the Supreme Court Justice describes how she scraped together just enough loose change for the bus fare to visit the Princeton campus because Amtrak was out of her budget. Although Sotomayor did not come from a wealthy background, it did not stop her from pursuing a future at the campus.

The struggles of a first-generation student do not end after enrolling in a 4-year institution. They persist throughout college.

The day I received my acceptance letter to UC Davis, I screamed with joy as I ran to tell my parents. Until that point, I was the first person in my family to receive an acceptance to a 4-year university. Yet, the challenges did not end with that acceptance letter.

During my freshman orientation, I was completely lost on how to register for classes. After numerous failed attempts to register for a math class, I finally told my orientation leader I was having trouble. I felt ashamed asking for her help because it seemed like a simple task that I should be able to figure out.

However, this feeling soon dissipated when the orientation leader explained the problem. She said I was trying to register for a class that was already fully enrolled. Then, she taught me how to narrow my search for classes on specific days, determine which classes were fully enrolled, and create alternative course schedules.

In recent years, colleges have acknowledged the growing first-generation student population, and many are taking steps to address their needs. 

One notable example is UC Merced. A 2018 New York Times article explains how 75% of students at UC Merced identify as first-generation college students. Due to these unique demographics, the school has been trying to implement strategies to help first-generation students enroll at the university and earn their degrees. Recently, UC Merced has partnered with College Track to provide high school freshmen from underserved communities with the tools and mentorship to be the first in their families to graduate from college. It is described as a 10-year commitment to students by "accompanying them on their journey to, through, and beyond college."

Because first-gen students are pioneers who are braving new challenges, they should feel a sense of power and pride.

"Should I just get a real lawyer?" and the un-prestigious life of a public defender

In You've Heard of Berkeley. Is Merced the Future of the University of California, Jennifer Medina discusses UC Merced's emergence as a home for Latino students, which is a contrast from the other University of California campuses. The article depicts a welcoming campus where brown students look around and see people who look like them, hear the music they listen to with their families, and even enjoy school-provided snacks that are special to their cultures. Even with all of these upsides, is the underlying message that stuck out to me was that UC Merced is not a prestigious institution. Medina states that UC Merced does not hold a similar nationwide reputation of academic excellence like other UC schools, it has a much higher acceptance rate, and it does not have a "star faculty" like other UC campuses.  

This article hit home for me in a lot of ways--one of which literal because I am a Merced native. Beyond this, it made me confront my own ideas about prestige and how they have changed overtime. The dictionary definition of prestige is, "widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality." Growing up, I don't think I was obsessed with prestige but my decision to attend UCLA was undoubtedly influenced by its prestige.

Fast forward to today: I have thankfully moved on from chasing prestige. Ironically, I am faced with the reality that I have chosen what is probably the least prestigious job in the legal profession: public defense. As I write this I can't help but laugh at the hilarious experience of a public defender. As a disclaimer, I hope no one who reads this feels bad for us because every PD I know laughs at it all, too.

A public defender is respected by virtually no one. As a law student, when you tell your classmates you are doing public defense work, their responses range from backhanded compliments about not having to worry about grades to weird projections about unlivable salaries and massive student loans (They say this even though we live in California and public defender salaries start at over six figures; plus, we are eligible for public service loan forgiveness after ten years).

In media, public defenders are absolutely brutalized. The image of the coffee-stained, disheveled public defender rushing into court with an ill-fitting suit and seventy-three files belonging to people whose names he can't even keep straight is common. Rapper Plies has a song titled 100 Years, where he very passionately critiques the racist criminal justice system. Within his critiques he states, "A public defender don't get you shit but a long trip," and "You ain't got a paid lawyer, then don't go to trial." The Night Of is an incredible show about a Pakistani college student from New York, Naz Khan, who is on trial for a brutal sexual assault and murder. When his lawyer, John Stone, is negotiating a fee agreement with Naz's parents, he warns them of the dangers of trusting a public defender by describing:

A legal-aid lawyer. And here's what you get for your money. It's a guy who starts his day in court, fishing a half a dozen random case files out of a wire basket, meets with his clients for a half hour before going in front of the judge, takes the first deal offered, goes around the corner to Starbucks, comes back with his latte, opens up the next file, and does the exact same things six times a day, every day.

These are just two of the hundreds of digs at public defenders in music and tv shows. I nevertheless truly love both this song and this show. They are masterpieces in their own ways and incredibly brave and honest looks at very serious issues that I care about deeply. But embedded within all of that pop culture goodness is the direct insult to my beloved career and life aspirations.

Media and classmates are not the worst of it. Most of the disrespect happens in the courtroom, coming from prosecutors, private attorneys, and even judges. All of these situations are incomparable to the highest offenders of disrespect. The worst, the absolute worst, of all of the ridicule comes from the very people for whom we do this job for: our clients. Before I move on, I want to make clear that I know I am not the victim in this dynamic! Our clients are in unbelievably stressful and horrific situations and it is my job to help them in any way, no matter how they respond to my efforts. Moreover, win, lose, or draw in every case, I get to go home and sleep in my bed and cash the biggest paychecks I have ever seen. The clients are the ones whose freedom, future, and lives are on the line--not mine. That being said, after all we do for them, and all we endure from everyone else on their behalf, the ever-repeating question of almost every client is always, without fail: "Should I just get a real lawyer?" It. Is. Maddening. The betrayal! We are supposed to be a family! It is you and me versus everybody! But many clients don't seem to know this. 

Until I worked as a public defender I didn't understand how hard the work was. When I worked in a public defender office in Monterey County this past summer, my days started at 5:00 AM. On days I had calendar calls, I went to the jail to talk to my clients before our calendar began at 8:15 AM. This gave us some privacy and more time to discuss the details of their cases. Then I was in court from 8:15-12 PM. During this time I argued motions, negotiated deals, communicated everything happening with clients and their families, prepped for trials, and most importantly tried to keep as many people out of jail as possible. 

I was then typically released until 1:30 PM. I usually spent that time going back to the jail to meet with more clients in custody, eating something on the way. I was back in court at 1:30 where the longer motions were set to be argued and any remaining calendar calls were run through. Then, I would go back to the office and start calling everyone on the calendar the next day to prepare them for whatever I expected was to come. In between all of this, and especially the one day a week I wasn't scheduled for court, I was investigating cases, interviewing and finding witnesses, finding experts, prepping testimonies, reading police reports, watching whatever footage we could find of incidents, calling families, going back to the jail, and the list goes on and on. It was the hardest I have ever worked in my life. And I really, really do love it. But even with all of this effort, I was still met with, "What do you think, should I just get a real lawyer?" 

Ultimately, the Jennifer Medina article made me reflect on how my life has done a 180 since my undergrad days and how I was never supposed to be prestigious or do prestigious work in the traditional sense. Just like the university I was born ten minutes away from, I was built to serve what I feel is a much more important purpose than upholding prestige. I can't imagine a UC deserving a higher form of widespread respect and admiration than the one that is welcoming and serving a demographic group that has been neglected by the rest of the UC system since its inception. I also can't imagine a more respectable legal career than one serving the most vulnerable and most voiceless members of society, even if they treat me like I'm a fake lawyer.

In Reflecting on the Institutional Process for College Success: The Experiences of Four Chicanos in the Context of Inequality, Gilberto Conchas tells a beautiful story about his navigation through his sociology studies and how his dad would remind him to make sure he is doing work "para la raza" aka for their people. This really touched me because my family and friends are the exact same way. I don't think there is a more prestigious job to those around me than one where I am using my intelligence, talents, and charisma to tackle the criminal justice system that has caused so much hurt to so many people, especially those in the community that raised me.

When I think of prestige I think of my mom reposting every article she sees on Facebook that mentions a public defender with a caption along the lines of, "A public defender just like my baby!" I think of the conversation my boyfriend had with his friend a couple weeks ago when I explained my future plans and his friend tried convincing me to go work for a certain corporation because of how much they pay. My boyfriend responded, "Riki would never do no shit like that. She has too much heart. That's why I respect her." I also think of the one client who called me a "public pretender" in the middle of court this past summer. He eventually apologized to me, saying, "You're not a public pretender. I can tell you will be a great attorney because you really care."

I hope all the students of the great UC Merced find their own version of prestige in a place where they are surrounded by their own people. I hope the university focuses on expanding and nurturing its current diverse student demographic and doesn't ruin itself by chasing after whatever prestige is.

Liberal Arts to Liberate the Mind: Why Every First-Generation Student Ought to Consider a Traditional Liberal Arts Degree

When I reflect on my experience applying to colleges as a high school student, I marvel at my family’s dearth of “insider information” in comparison to others. I now realize how some parents helped their children publish op-ed articles in the local newspaper, enroll in local college classes while still in high school, or guide them through countless science-related competitions. I am happy for these folks. Their kids ended up at MIT, Stanford, and the likes, and they earned it.
But I envy a different sort of insider information. That of families who realized the importance of a liberal arts education.

I didn’t know what a liberal arts college was when I submitted my applications to universities. I thought that real colleges were called “universities,” and that they were predominately research institutions that were featured in the US News rankings for “National Universities”. I paid no attention to the other list of top colleges produced by the same publisher: “National Liberal Arts Colleges”.

Maybe I missed this because of my immigrant background—I only imagined college as a means for acquiring a good career, which at that time probably meant becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or someone who works in “finance”. The notion of education as a means to a job–a high paying job–is a relatively modern phenomenon, and one that has enraptured much of the South Asian immigrant community. Perhaps the roots of this, in my community at least, stems from strategic measures by British colonists to erase institutions of traditional learning (including madrasas steeped in what is now called the Islamic liberal arts) in India, replacing them with English-standard schools meant to train individuals to acquire “good jobs” in the colonial administration. (See John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason, 157-169, Cambridge University Press (2013)).

So, what is a liberal arts education, and why is it important? The American philosopher Mortimer Adler says:

The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called "humanities." In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such as mathematics and physics, are considered equally liberal, that is, equally able to develop the powers of the mind.

The liberal-arts tradition goes back to the medieval curriculum. It consisted of two parts. The first part, trivium, comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It taught the arts of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, and of sound thinking. The other part, the quadivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (not audible music, but music conceived as a mathematical science). It taught the arts of observation, calculation, and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspect of things. Nowadays, of course, we would add many more sciences, natural and social. This is just what has been done in the various modern attempts to renew liberal education.

More importantly, Adler explains that the aim of a liberal arts education is to “develop free human beings who know how to use their minds and are able to think for themselves.” And in doing so, “[A liberal arts education] produces citizens who can exercise their political liberty responsibly. It develops cultivated persons who can use their leisure fruitfully. It is an education for all free men, whether they intend to be scientists or not.”

Finally, Adler concludes: “Our educational problem is how to produce free men, not hordes of uncultivated, trained technicians.” 

Interestingly, there is an argument for the liberal arts as a "social justice" tool to uplift those who face unparalleled, and even structural, challenges. Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Adams Parham argue in their recently published book, The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, that the power of a classical liberal arts education is such that it is a tool to even “liberate the black mind.” 

This should be of no surprise to folks who have studied the great black intellectuals of the civil rights movement. 

The classical liberal arts undoubtedly influenced Dr. King. He was a master of the Western intellectual tradition. The syllabus for a seminar course he taught at Morehouse College would be controversial in the eyes of the contemporary “woke” culture at progressive institutions. It commences with writings from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and continues chronologically with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—all dead white men, though with flaws in their lives and thoughts, nonetheless vital in their roles in the quest for justice and the good life.

Dr. King didn’t just teach these works, he internalized them. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail is replete with references to Socrates and verbatim quotations (from memory) from Aquinas, Augustine, and other great thinkers from the Western canon.

Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University, eloquently concludes of Dr. King’s relationship with the classical liberal arts and its relationship to our time:

King had internalised the liberatory history of ideas and debates he taught. For him, the Morehouse syllabus traced “the moral arc of the universe”, which he believed “bends towards justice”. Faced with ideological polarisation that threatens the foundations of liberal democracy, it behoves us to recover the political tradition embodied in King’s syllabus. It represents the connective tissue of our politics, the discursive bridges by which we may work out solutions to our thorniest problems. We must challenge the simplistic mentality that casts this tradition as irredeemably patriarchal, white, and elitist, and which, by doing so, makes students more provincial and less effective actors for social change. It is precisely because the tradition reflects an unfolding struggle for justice that it provides us with potent sources of argument, strategy and vision for addressing the inequalities and abuses that persist in our society. 

Unfortunately, for me, I realized this late. But I believed so strongly in the importance of a liberal arts education that I returned to college in my mid 20s to complete a second four-year bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college. Despite the pressures to go to college to earn a degree that simply results in a good-paying job, I urge young students to explore the liberal arts, and to enter into the fascinating and immensely important realm of the life of the mind. 
 

How the best can be better

Point of view: you are a senior in high school drowning in a plethora of Advanced Placement courses, serve on leadership for varying extracurriculars, and train for your varsity sports team with whatever little time and energy you have left. Yet, you know somehow that all of this dedication and hard work is the bare minimum to get into one of the highly acclaimed University of California institutions.

This viewpoint is my own high school experience. I worked very hard during that time and it drained me. Yet, I did not feel like I did enough. At the time, I knew that my grades and my accomplishments were good, but they weren't unique enough to stand out amongst thousands of other applicants. Additionally, my standardized test scores were average and barely enough to get into most UCs.

A picture of me (bottom left) at the California Speech and Debate State Qualifiers. This was one of the activities I was heavily involved in during high school.

Due to my circumstances and the competitive public university system in California, I felt that I needed to highlight my adversities and trauma to prove that I was deserving of a spot in the incoming freshman class at one of the campuses. The only issue was that I don't really linger on traumatic experiences in my life or let them define me. I felt frustrated that I had to share these personal experiences with unknown university officials who would judge if my experience was "traumatic" enough to justify my admission. I did not feel like the application process for these campuses accurately reflected the type of student I was and had the potential to be. However, I do feel that I got lucky and ended up at the perfect school for my situation, which was the University of California, Davis.

Regardless, thousands of students apply to California universities under the same rigid standards. Many applicants like first generation students and ones with fewer educational and financial resources don't know the tips and tricks into submitting a good application. Additionally, not all of these students end up at a school that is accommodating to their situations. The college journeys of three close friends from a rural town in Texas, displayed how even the brightest of students who overcame many hurdles in their path to a higher education, struggled to graduate once they made it to college.

It is important to submit application to not only the right schools, but to make them competitive as well. These admission results have a significant effect on defining an individual's self-worth. It is no wonder that schools like Downtown Magnets in Los Angeles have to hold "rejection parties" to try to shift the negative tone and high stress associated with college rejection letters.

The college admission process at varying institutions may be able to better the education of students by implementing more holistic admission processes. These processes should consider more than just grades and test scores. For the University of California, applicants submit the same application for each UC even though every institution is vastly different from the others in location, campus cultures, and specialties. Additionally, the stigma and obsession associated with college rankings by varying news reports does not help in placing students at campuses that are best suited for their circumstances. It may be beneficial for universities to care less about their ranking and shift their focus towards creating admission processes that recruit suitable students for their institution.

Many individuals feel compelled to go to certain institutions because they're ranked higher than others. Judgement for not choosing to attend a higher ranked institution can come from strangers, friends, and even family members. My younger brother experienced this judgement firsthand while choosing to attend between UC Irvine and higher ranked UC Berkeley. Additionally, some Hispanic students feel more of a sense of belonging at UC Merced versus other UCs because the student body consists of students who share similar backgrounds and this reduces the stress of a shocking academic chapter for many first generation students.

UC Davis highlighting the school's ranking on it's official Instagram page.

It may be beneficial for colleges to incorporate more "fun" questions in their admission applications. Since actual interviews with every applicant would be unfeasible for many colleges, questions on applications could serve an interview or survey-type energy. These types of questions may be able to better gage what student would fit best at an institution. These questions could even be presented in a Buzzfeed quiz type of format that would help the applicants see what school is best for their situation as well. Processes like this incorporated with other procedural aspects of the application process may help students find the school best-suited for them.

Screenshot of quiz question from Brainfall's "Which University of California Campus Do You Belong At?"