Week 4: LFADS - The Privileged Poor: I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

          Anthony Jack's discussion of the "hidden curriculum" reminded me of conversations I have with my sister.  We reflect often on the fact that our parents are not college educated, how they had never been able to teach us how to navigate higher education, and how things are will be different for our nieces and nephews (they'll have Dr. Aunties to help them).

          I was the first of my siblings to entertain the idea of going to college.  I can remember my parents saying, "well if you want to go to college, you should take the SATs," but never providing me with resources to study for the SATs.  In fact, the day before I was supposed to take them, I got so nervous and anxious that I physically got sick and decided not to go.  My parents are intelligent individuals, but they didn't truly understand the process of applying for financial aid, writing personal statements, that college applications cost money, or even how going to college would really improve my life.  Many of the programs at my high school that would have provided support and guidance were often recommended by our guidance counselors, and my guidance counselor stopped encouraging me to go to a 4-year institution once he met my brown mother.

          My path to college, and to where I am at today, started at Mt. San Antonio Community (Mt. Sac) College.  In addition to being the first member of my immediate family to go to college, I was the first of 13 grandchildren to go to college.  Having no college students or graduates in my life to help guide me, I started my first day at Mt. Sac completely unprepared.  My high school teachers had never shown me how to properly study.  I sometimes think that it was assumed that I was smart enough to figure it out on my own.  As a student who had to work full time in order to pay for my tuition (my parents couldn't pay for mine because my sister was at UCLA within three years of me starting community college), I worked all day and took classes at night.  This meant that I missed out on many of the opportunities to engage in programs that would provide me with the skills and knowledge to succeed in college, and that I didn't have a lot of time to develop relationships with professors - and no one ever told me that these were important aspects of the educational experience.  My need to pay for tuition and books prevented me from learning how to navigate higher education.

          To this day I still believe that I have no clue what I am doing, and every day is a learning experience. What I do know is that I was meant to travel the rough road(s) to earning my degrees so that my nieces and nephews have someone to help them navigate this constantly changing system.