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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If anyone wants to read a tearjerker, read this story about how Princeton treated one first gen student, Juan Pabon, back in the 1990s. The university ended up making amends, so to speak. https://paw.princeton.edu/issues/v119-n06-01092019[/quote]

Thank you for this link.  This story really resonates with me.  I’m a WOC.  I went from urban public schools to a top tier Ivy — that I hadn’t previously visited.   I had a horrible freshman advisor. I now know that I could have requested a change.  I had a family tragedy the summer after my freshman year. I now know that I could have told a dean and received counseling or other support services.  It says a lot, too, that no one in my extremely supportive group of friends suggested that I tell someone what I was going through.  We were all new —or new-ish to environments like this, and didn’t know what we didn’t know.

I thrived academically and eventually earned a PhD.  I got an emotionally taxing save-the-world type of job that I loved, making what felt like “enough” money.  The grant funded job eventually ended, just as a parent critically needed care and advocacy with what turned out to be end-of-life issues.  For the best of reasons, I got derailed.  I’m now trying to recreate a professional life for myself.  I berate myself sometimes for not having sought out mentors and developed relationships that would have facilitated networking— a word I never heard before I was unemployed.

You can’t know what you don’t know.  But it sucks to realize that there were so many things that I didn’t know —because the people who cared about me didn’t know them either, while the people who knew them didn’t care about me enough to share their knowledge — or, more likely, didn’t know what I didn’t know.  I was —and am — both cynical and naive.

I’m happy with the choices I’ve made, in that I’ve been able to live up to my own values.  I also wish, though, that I had known that I actually had many more choices and even many more sources of potential support than I realized.  I don’t feel that I squandered my education.  I deeply enjoyed the academics, lived up to my academic potential, and have used my growing skills in ways that have had a genuine positive and meaningful impact.  At the same time, I’m in a financially precarious position, and I’m struggling to figure out ways to use the next phase of my life in ways that will sustain me intellectually, emotionally, and financially.

I get it, OP.

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