The Researchers Reflect

Ashley Crooks-Allen, 2nd Year Graduate Student in Sociology

This project has been an academic and personal journey for me. For me first generation means something totally different as part of my identity. I am the first in my family to be born in the United States. So although I am not the first in my family to go to college, I also had a difficult time navigating the college experience, just for different reasons. Both of my parents and my older sister are all from Costa Rica but between the four of us we’ve got 4 bachelors degrees, 2 masters degrees, and another masters/doctorate in progress. I am the “in progress”; I like to say all of us in the human experience are in progress. I think because I enrolled in this class to learn to do research storytelling, it was a challenge to remind myself throughout this experience that we could let the story guide us. I kept wanting the story to fit the some sort of vague preconceived vision but there are some things that you cannot control. This project reaffirmed my belief in the power of storytelling, the centering of narrative, and its place in sociology.

 

Mackenzie Beck, Senior, Majoring in Sociology

Students within our study faced many personal and shared challenges upon attending UGA. Initial fears about a predominantly white environment of many thousand students gave way to more individual struggles like finding time to study and connecting with a like-minded community on campus. Resources provided by TRIO helped Cris* find more time to study and provided a support system for Vivian. Stephanie connected with other programs but remained unfamiliar with DAE offerings during her time here, and Jasmine spent her first few months becoming very involved in programs like TRIO and other extracurriculars on campus. The different trajectories of our subjects prove that students access information about programs on campus in different ways and often, that is influenced by their different experiences and goals upon arriving. Current limitations on the programs directed towards first-generation students hinder their ability to reach all the students that could benefit from their resources.

This project introduced my research partners and myself to the process of storytelling. What we found within that process was the challenges of competing narratives and reliance upon subjects' self-identification. Stories emerge from everywhere, and here at UGA, the overflowing waitlists of TRIO bear witness to the first-generation students who explore an unfamiliar new home and make it their own. Even with the guidance offered by these programs, so many first-generation students feel lost or alone when they leave support systems behind. It should be the goal of UGA to build more networks and support the programs that connect first-generation students to a community on campus. 

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Morgan McCauley, Senior, Majoring in Sociology

Being a First-Generation student, my experience was a bit different from those that are not. My eyes were opened to many opportunities that I was never connected to that were available to First-Generation students. There are a significant amount of resources that are available and some of those resources are being utilized but there are so many resources that are not being used by the students nor First-Generation students. This class also provided many challenges and promoted creative thinking that expanded my mind in a storytelling way.

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Joe Lavine, Senior, Majoring in Entertainment and Media Studies; Sociology

Throughout my first two years at UGA, I put a lot of thought into choosing my two majors. I knew I wanted to tell stories, and I knew I wanted these stories to deal with with how soceity functions and why. So when I learned about this class, I was in awe over how much it suited these interests. It did not disappoint. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of negotiating with the client, determining a topic that we believe is helpful for the client, and then mapping out a plan to tell that story in a compelling way. Additionally, as I'm accustomed to in the career that I'm pursuing, one moment in this project included with it a significant "privilege wake-up call" for me. I realized that I was taking for granted a certain aspect of my college experience at the University of Georgia. This was just one of many educational moments over the course of this project. Though I must say that there certainly were some challenges along the way, I am grateful that this project provided me with the opportunity to learn from them and respond to these challenges.