What you do here doesn't change your status of first gen. My kids are first gen. I came here in high school, but my parents are college educated with white collar jobs and so am I. THey're still first generation since nobody else was born here. |
fluency in 3 languages if very uncommon. saying "i am fluent" while being very far from it, is common. |
You’re a first generation American but for college apps the inquiry is whether you are the first generation to go to college. Different meaning. |
It's not actually that you are the first generation to go to college. What matters is if your parents went to college. Your grandparents could all have advanced degrees but if your parents didn't go to college, you are first generation (that would be unlikely, of course). |
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I had a friend in college who was the son of Swiss diplomats and spoke 5 languages, but he was also studying international relations himself. So it depends a bit on the field.
Re: generation, no they won't consider the child of someone with a degree from abroad to be first generation. It's more about helping kids who don't necessarily have the advantages of being able to navigate the system. |
No, they aren’t, first generation means first generation to attend college. |
What about: - born and raised here, so not born into it, but - German - Spanish - English? For a math/sci/ pre-med kid? |
I don’t think schools care at all, why would they? |
because they care about dozens of irrelevant hobbies? |
What are you doing with the languages though. Fluency in of itself us not a compelling activity/attribute. |
| A lot of ppl here seem clueless about what colleges are looking for. |
Trilingualism in the U.S. is extremely uncommon, probably less than 1 in a thousand. Claiming Trilingualism in the U.S. is probably 1 in 10. |
Right. It makes a huge difference to have parents who went to college/university, even if they didn’t graduate. If you grew up with parents who had even some college, you simply have no idea how different life is for kids whose parents barely graduated from high school. It makes for a much, much tougher row to hoe, where you don’t know what you don’t know and everyone around you seems to know some secret handshake that no one told you about. This was my life and it was only in raising my own kids that I really took in how much harder it was for me to navigate college and grad school coming from parents where one graduated from high school and one had a GED. |
It’s only common if one of the language spoken at home is not English. American educated students with American families who are English speaking usually aren’t fluent even with their AP Spanish. European kids, especially Eastern Europeans speak 2-4 languages. Fluently. The ones who don’t are UK students. |
Why would the child of someone whose parents went to college in a different university be able to navigate the system more than the child of someone whose parents grew up here but didn't go to college? |