I was incredibly honored to be asked to give some remarks at this year’s MIT FLI Welcome Dinner. FLI is the term used at MIT for first-gen (first in family to attend college) and/or low-income students. Recognizing and supporting first gen and low income students is something that has grown over the last few decades and I do really love how MIT attends to that segment of the undergrad population (according to MIT’s figures about 30% of the undergrad student body fits into that category). I’d never done something like this before so it felt like a pretty big leap but I’m really glad I did it. Below are my remarks.
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Big thanks to Alex, Tiffany, and the FLI team for the invitation to speak tonight. Since coming to MIT 13 years ago I’ve found this community to be one of my favorite places to connect with students and colleagues so I’m really excited to be here.
The theme for this year is “cultivating your community” and I was asked to reflect on this in regards to my own journey. For a bit of background about me if I haven’t met you yet, I’m a community college graduate, a product of the California system that gave many of us a way to transition into a more traditional four year education.
I come from a working class family and, while abstractly my parents valued education, having not gone to college themselves the paths to it weren’t really something they could help me with. My mom only returned to graduate high school in her 30s and my father was a manual laborer.
By the time I was in high school, all the prep you get from a college-oriented system – including school counselors who saw potential – was just not in place for me. So when I graduated high school I just started just waitressing full time, fairly aimlessly. It was only when an older friend said I should “do something with my life” and take classes at the local community college did I give school another shot.
This was back in the mid 1980s and honestly, we just didn’t have the language then to describe “first gen” or even being a low income student. I’d say if anything when I transitioned from community college to UC Berkeley I more struggled with “passing.” I was aware of my difference. I didn’t have many of the experiences my new fellow students had. I’d never lived in the dorms, I didn’t have money to do cool summer programs, and I’d never even taken a SAT (…I still haven’t)
It may surprise you when I tell you that, for me, cultivating my community really happened when I came to MIT. I’d certainly read things over the years about being a working-class academic and as a sociologist, we think a lot about issues around class, cultural capital, and forms of hierarchy and stratification.
But it was in coming to MIT and meeting some fellow academics who were key in launching support for the nascent FLI community back then – people Professors Christine Walley, Scott Hughes, and Paul Legace – that I began to see a community I had always been a part of, but not quite had a name for. This was also when I began to meet you, the students, who were coming to proudly identity as FLI and build community together.
It was in my conversations with you all, in sharing my own story, that I came to find a new feeling of support and encouragement. When I finally added my community college experience and Associates degree to my CV after I got Full Professor – something I’d long left off it – it was my FLI students especially that were cheering me on.
The sociologist C. Wright Mills described something he called the sociological imagination—the move to connect up our personal biography to larger structures, societal trends, and historical shifts. Naming ourselves, sharing our experiences, seeing ways we are structurally connected, supporting and leaning on one another are to me core components of cultivating your community.
I also think there is much we can still do to champion – to cultivate – the unique traits, and strengths, those of us who are first gen or come from low income backgrounds bring to academia, which is otherwise often too hidebound to upper and middle class values and has powerful blind spots.
For me cultivating your community is most fruitfully done when coupled with that sociological imagination. It can allow us to see structural inequities and work to address them together. It can allow us to see how feelings of being an outsider or “imposter” are tied to larger ideologies, and how we might collectively resist those.
Cultivating our community also means finding connection to each other in the everyday spaces of life. Sharing challenges, reaching out for help, risking the vulnerable question, lending an ear to one another.
We also need not shy away from not knowing how academia works. The idea that we should come into university life with no questions, with no confusions or concerns, no blind spots of our own, is a myth built on a belief that everyone here at MIT is the same. But we aren’t, and that diversity is something to celebrate, not try and cover up.
Cultivating our community means being there for each other in the tough moments and also standing together in solidarity.
There is a power in naming something. We didn’t have a name for ourselves when I was a college student. We tended to stay hidden, not aware of the ways our own personal struggles were shared by others.
But now, we have a name and a way to make this community visible, both to each other and to others.
If you look around you right now you’ll see you aren’t alone, there’s a whole range of us at different points in the journey. I hope you come to find support and care in this amazing community as I have.