Category Stories: First Generation
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Learning to Live Independently from Home
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Freshman Year When I made the decision to study abroad I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy transition. I am a homebody who has never lived more than a few hours away from my family. My first few weeks at college back home were spent calling home basically every free minute I had.…
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Learning How to Swim in Troubled Waters
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Life is truly unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen, when it’ll happen, or where you’ll end up. In some cases, this means being granted some of the best blessings in life; exploring countries you never thought you’d ever see. In other cases, this means dealing with hardships that derail you from everything you…
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Abroad: This is For Me, Not For You…
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Being First Gen My background as a first-generation student has been crucial in determining the experiences I’ve had growing up. For me, being first-generation means coming from a low-income family with immigrant parents; well meaning but unable to give advice on how to navigate the U.S. education system and careers that follow after. It also…
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How Study Abroad Helped my Mental Health and Emotions
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Mental Health Back Home My emotions are something I’ve struggled with a lot in the past. In particular, I feel this at my home university because at Colby I feel stressed and sometimes lonely. Being so far away from home at Colby is hard. I always miss my family and the comfort of Chicago: of…
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From Regret to Optimism: Finding Common Ground in a Foreign Institution
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Re-posted with consent from Lea Morin and the Amherst Global Education blog, Beyond the Bubble: The overarching feeling I’ve had since my journey to London has been one of regret. Leading up to my departure, I was on campus working and observing the start of the Fall semester at Amherst as an outsider. I didn’t get to share…
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How To Overcome First Generation Hurdles While Studying Abroad
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Let me start by saying that I am a first-generation college student who grew up in poverty. I have also struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life. At one point, I started failing classes and had to drop out of college for a year and a half. Studying abroad has always been…
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Some Thoughts on the Unexpected Benefits of Traveling Solo
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Traveling During the six-week Easter break afforded to me at Oxford, I accomplished some travel. This was about a month and a half’s worth, most of it alone, as I took trains around the South of France and Alpine Austria, did a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and spent a frankly unnecessarily long time in Bordeaux. There’s something to…
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Exploring My Mexican Identity in México: Part II
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“Cuando la ire a ver?” “When will I see her again?” my grandmother says with such despair as tears gather in her eyes. She’s holding my phone, looking at a photo of my mom. They haven’t seen each other, hugged each other, or held each other in 20 years. “No, creo que ya no la…
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How to Reset While Abroad
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As I passed the two-month marker of my semester abroad, I entered a rut: one that can only be described as complacency. I had become complacent with a schedule that did not leave me excited to leave my bed. I went to classes and paid very minimal attention, if any. I just went through the…
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How being a first-generation college student pushed me to study abroad
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When the world was thirty-three years younger than it is now, my dad graduated high school with his head somewhere in the clouds, because that was the best place to find the kind of birds he was looking for. Gray ones, camo ones, with bodies that were built not grown, stomachs that guzzled gas not…
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