What's Next?: A First To Go Career Handbook

Acknowledgments and Recognitions

To the Lily Foundation:

We sincerely thank the Lily Foundation for their generous support through the NetVue Program Development grant. This funding has empowered us to develop intentional career education tools specifically designed for first-generation students, focusing on those who have been systemically, racially, and economically marginalized. Your contribution has allowed us to engage with diverse stakeholders, on and off campus, and begin exploring the complex mental-emotional trajectories that play a crucial role in vocation development. The foundation's commitment to our work has provided a solid foundation to continue exploring how personalized career education can be effectively merged with a social justice mindset, fostering meaningful vocations for our students. We are deeply appreciative of your partnership and look forward to the impactful progress that lies ahead.

Indigenous Justice and Land Acknowledgment:

“The County of Los Angeles recognizes that we occupy land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples. We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants past, present, and emerging as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma. This acknowledgment demonstrates our responsibility and commitment to truth, healing, and reconciliation and to elevating the stories, culture, and community of the original inhabitants of Los Angeles County” (County of Los Angeles Land Acknowledgement).

Website for additional resources: https://lacounty.gov/government/about-la-county/landacknowledgment/

Why do we recognize the land?

"To recognize the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory you reside on, and a way of honoring the Indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial. It is important to understand the long-standing history that has brought you to reside on the land and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgments do not exist in a past tense, or historical context: colonialism is a current ongoing process, and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation. It is also worth noting that acknowledging the land is Indigenous protocol" (Northwestern University, Native American and Indigenous Initiatives).

Website for additional resources: https://www.naspa.org/division/indigenous-peoples

Black Labor Acknowledgment:

“We recognize that the United States as we know it was built at the often-fatal expense of forcefully enslaved Black people. We must acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants who suffered the horror of the transatlantic trafficking, chattel slavery, and, later on, dehumanization through segregation and Jim Crow laws.

We acknowledge and remember those who did not survive the Middle Passage, those who were beaten and lynched at the hands of White Americans, and those who are still suffering while fighting for their freedom. We remember those who toiled the ground where many [spaces] have been built and resurrected.

We are indebted to their labor and their unwilling sacrifice, and we must acknowledge the tremors of that violence throughout the generations and the resulting impact and generational trauma is still felt and witnessed today” (Paramount Theatre, Aurora, IL).

Website for additional resources: https://paramountaurora.com/2021/05/black-laboracknowledgment/

Ancestral Calling:

This is a call for collective love, mourning, and healing for the ancestors, elders, youth, mothers, fathers, friends, organizers, loved ones, and individuals whom we did not get to meet but feel in our hearts. The struggle is relentless, but hope, feeling, justice, and love are endless. Our ancestors held on long enough so that we could become. May we carry their lives with us.

Addressing Unstable Times, Genocide, and Loss:

This handbook was written as the world continues to face several epidemics medical, racial, political, economic, and connection epidemics. As we speak, several global spaces Palestine, Tigray, Sudan, Puerto Rico, Congo, Haiti, Hawaii, and many more are facing massive and interlocking forms of catastrophe. Amid this time, marked by profound instability, loss, and the enduring scars of genocide, we pause to acknowledge the weight of the world we find ourselves in. The reality of these tragedies both historical and ongoing compels us to confront the pain, suffering, and injustice that continue to shape our collective experience. We honor the memories of those who have been lost, and the communities that have been devastated and uplift them in hope and desire for the safety of those who continue to carry the relentless search and struggle for justice and remembrance. As we progress in our work, we do so with a profound recognition of the sorrow that permeates our world and a renewed commitment to creating healing, justice, and hope spaces. In accomplice-ship with all who mourn and seek a different, more radically loving world culture, we dedicate ourselves to standing with you.

Preface

Welcome.

Ourdirection:

Wherever you are, wherever you are starting, know that this handbook you are holding is our symbolic representation of community. Meaning that you in the middle of this career exploration1 journey are not alone (An overused phrase, we know, but seriously true and often forgotten). First-generation disrupters and justice seekers before and after you have decided to transform how we “do” college and “build” vocations, and their questions, alongside yours, have given higher education practitioners pause. Your story has become a national call to higher education institutions to get specific. Specific with our services, conversations, and initiatives because you deserve an experience outside the “onesize-fits all” mold you are uniquely you. Your needs and realities are uniquely yours, so your story has become our motive to do better, to be better. Your drive to turn sacrifices into fulfilled promises, the need to lift as you rise, and your desire to transform trajectories of structural harm make you an “emergent strategist” in the making. And we your community wish to tell you that we aim to strategize with and for you.

adrienne maree brown describes emergent strategy as a “strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (2017, p. 2), and that is how we’ll take this upcoming journey: With intentionality, with criticality, and with practice with others. Small interactions build thorough foundations, and you are building “connective tissue” between our shared societal history, personal realities and responsibilities, values and aspirations, and what we hope is your trajectory to being a proactive member dedicated to co-constructing an interdependent future that relies on connection and radical love. We’re counting on you just like you can count on us to urge career cultures from focusing on hegemonic, individual hustle norms that hyper-focus on meritocratic and financial versions of success to a collective one that centers the emotional, spiritual, mental, and advocate nature of what truly is behind the world of career...especially for those of us who come from historically and presently marginalized communities who have, and continue, facing systemic violence in the academy and the workplace.

So, folks, we will take the “little step” approach with this career understanding and career education journey. All questions and insecurities are valid here, and if we don’t arrive at every “Aha!” moment you were hoping for, I hope we can make the room needed to be okay with the perpetual mystery of not having all the answers. Sounds frustrating, we know...we don’t like it here sometimes either. But hey, we’re always in the process of “arriving,"” arriving at realizations, ideas for moving forward, and that spark of energy in the center of your brain and heart called courage. And arriving at those points, friends, means taking various moments of deep introspection, ongoing debriefs with others, and accepting your place and power in shaping a world that needs your compassionate leadership, criticality, imagination, and hope.

1 In this handbook, we will utilize the terms "career" and "vocation" interchangeably. We have decided to do so because we view the notion of a career as more than a job, but instead, a call to serve a grander purpose. We want to create a connection between career and social justice, and to attain that profundity, we see it necessary to perceive career and the process of pursuing one as a "calling," which is a term that is often associated to the idea of vocation.

As you skim through these pages written with a whole bunch of faith in who you are and will be, we ask that you try to practice honest kindness with yourself, be brave enough to have confusing and tough conversations with those who have your back and those who deserve to know you, and that you listen to where your gladness takes you. Along the way, scribble in those thoughts on the digital margins, jot down questions as they come and pop into your mind, and reach out to those in your first-gen support web. But most importantly, emergent strategist-hopefully-becoming-professional troublemaker (Luvvie Ajayi Jones) try to take things piece by piece. Question by question. Strategy by strategy. Little step by little step.

With love,

Your LMU First-Gen Family

Context is Key: Understanding the Structural and Systemic Influences Defining Career and Vocation Education Cultures

“Our ancestors held on long enough so that we could become.” -Unknown

ARecommitmenttoSocialJustice-DrivenCareerAdvocacy:

The career and vocational development field has century-old roots in social justice advocacy (Stebleton & Jehangir, 2020). Over time, societal influences caused a decline in career-based advocacy, but there is now a renewed focus on historically and systemically underserved populations (Jehangir et al., 2020, p. 59). This renewed momentum in the field has highlighted several gaps in knowledge, especially regarding methodology, ideology, and intentionality, which vary based on students' diverse identities and histories. These gaps were and remain glaring, as it became evident that many invested in higher education were not centering the specific experiences of underserved and marginalized populations in creating their services. So, like those of us in the first-gen community who often need to journey for answers, higher education practitioners and scholars began to question and inquire about student experiences, identities, and feelings. Therefore, as we discuss and explore “career education” together, we must understand it holistically. To do that, you and I will explore the nittygritty emotional and mental trajectories we often leave unrecognized in the academic setting, let alone the career education space. Fun stuff, huh?

To run alongside this momentum to overhaul old-school notions of what career and “ success ” should look like, this handbook will practice how to address a few of the mental-emotional realities often influencing first-generation college students in pursuit of meaningful career education, and consequently, deeply personal careers. Above all, this tiny yet loud handbook emphasizes the need for identity-intersectional and culturally sustaining career counseling and education. And just so we all know what we mean by “identity-intersectional and culturally sustaining career counseling,” this term/phrase/notion/call to action draws from the concept of intersectionality and its historical context, particularly Crenshaw’s (1991) work. This term reflects a fluid, sociopolitical experience that questions and learns from history, present-day legacies of oppression, and the evolving realities of individuals who do not fit within the paradigms of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984/2004). In essence, we have work to do and critical work at that. We may be the first, but we’re not the last, and we’re worth halting “one-size-fits-all” approaches to our education (an education that is not cheap under any circumstances).

Yet, my handbook-reading friends, it’s important that we ground where this handbook draws its education from, for we stand on the shoulders of ancestors who have given us ways forward. So, as we call for culturally sustaining career education, we honor movements and scholarship dedicated to Indigenous-led education, Indigenous sovereignty, and the asset-based, gift-giving nature of Indigenous teachings, culture, and resistance (Jacob et al., 2018; McCarty & Lee, 2014), for the objectives and missions undergirding the latter has paved the way for our pursuit for educational justice. In this context, culturally sustaining career counseling and education emphasizes how higher education practitioners and career educators can integrate culture into the career counseling and

preparation process. Moreover, culturally sustaining career counseling challenges Western-dominant notions of individualized success and the hegemony of these ideas in higher education realizations we needed to have had, like yesterday, because we can't move Oppression Mountain and Individualism Island on our own.

We understand that maintaining social justice advocacy in educational spaces can be exhaustive. Education is comprised of several socially unjust practices and components. For example, the erasure of marginalized people's voices and lived experiences, manipulation of legal policy, and the struggle of peoples and communities who constantly challenge dominant white culture that may lead many of us to “self-alienation and harsh assimilation” (Williamson et al., 2007, p. 211). As firstgen, we may, at times or even most of the time feel the need to assimilate into the spaces we strive to enter in the name of social and economic upward mobility. This need for underserved and/or systemically marginalized communities to assimilate to oppressive systems to “succeed” is influenced by America’s obsession with exceptionalism and individualism. Do the phrases “you do you” or “fake it ‘till you make it” ring a bell? Pervasive, aren’t they? It now falls on us to remind each other that we are one another’s lifeline and that there are alternate realities we can choose that can align our future vocation to the world’s greatest need. It will take many a conversation and many more moments of pause to understand why we feel what we feel when it comes to “making it.” However, if we’re ever going to act on our imaginings of a different world, then we must trudge through the tough stuff to see what’s internally bubbling within you. We need all of you, not pieces of you.

After the freefall of emotions and the rollercoaster of social histories we’ve already whirled through, here’s another central question that guided the reason we put together this handbook: What would it look like to create social justice-driven, identity-intersectional, and culturally sustaining career education services for economically marginalized, first-generation students?

Answering the question above may not seem to hold much weight, but many of you are in a university setting to see who you’ll become and what direction you’ll pursue. Yet, we’re here to tell you that becoming more than you know and pursuing the goals you’ll develop will require people to be by your side. People need people, and people need connection. And connection, if we haven’t noticed lately, has not been coming easy for our highly digitized, divided world. We need to dig deep to figure out what gifts our community has given us because we are more than what folks can initially see. So, given the multiplicity of first-generation students specifically, economically and racially marginalized first-generation students this handbook calls for innovative career education practices that center student lives and an examination of the larger question: “How and why are institutions failing to serve first-generation college students?” (Garriott, 2020, p. 89). But we can flip the script on this question, and trust me, this question wants to be flipped. We cannot stop at simply knowing that our career practices often falter because college-wide solutions have not responded to the particularities, histories, and sensibilities with which first-generation students enter spaces (Fickling et al., 2018). We must move from knowing to sense-making how scholars, practitioners, and students can collectively coalesce to reconstruct career and vocation education methods with context, history, and culture in mind. You in?

Pause&GroundActivity:

Definitions:

Utilizing your personal experience, values, and beliefs, define the following terms/words:

1. Vocation:

2. Collectivism:

3. Career Education:

4. Success:

5. Social Justice:

6. Transformative Justice:

7. Community:

8. Ancestors:

9. Professional Troublemaker

10. Trailblazer:

11. First-Gen Disrupter:

12. First-Gen Professional:

After developing your definitions, do you see any similarities or differences between how you define them and how they are “typically” defined? Where do those similarities or differences stem from? How do you think these definitions will remain the same or change as you continue your life path?

Delvinginto“ProfessionalTroublemaker”Work:

There's an incredible book out in the universe called Professional Troublemaker: The Fear Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. It is a must-read for those who must prepare for justice work in the workplaces and vocational spaces we are committing to. This book journeys through various topics, but chiefly among them is figuring out how one prepares to be a “fear fighter” in our environments. As this handbook has already let you know, preparing for “what’s next” also includes figuring out your own mission statement, connection to your awesomeness, and why that all matters in the vocational discovery process. Therefore, to assist you with understanding the entry activities Jones offers in her book, we will offer a paraphrased summary of Jones’ first chapter:

In the opening chapter of Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, Luvvie Ajayi Jones introduces readers to becoming a “professional troublemaker” and the necessity of considering this identity. She defines a professional troublemaker not as someone who causes “conflict” or “chaos” for the sake of it but as a person who has intentionally accepted to challenge the status quo, who desires to speak truth to power, and who stands up for what they believe in despite of potential fears although valid and present those fears may be. In essence, Jones argues that fear often holds many individuals back from being their honest selves and from taking the necessary risks needed to push for active and consistent change. The chapter invites readers to embrace the troublemaker they hold within by understanding and confronting fears and recognizing the value of doing so as an act of learning how to speak up and out.

Throughout the book, Jones also stresses the importance of shaping one's mission in life. She believes that by clarifying our sense of purpose, we can move more confidently through the world, making decisions that align with our more genuine selves, especially in the spaces we inhabit. Additionally, she introduces the concept of an oriki, a Yoruba tradition that involves creating a praise poem or a series of affirmations that highlight one's strengths, heritage, and identity. Jones presents the mission statement and oriki tools to help readers cultivate self-awareness and courage as they embark on their journey to become professional troublemakers.

We highly recommend you follow the instructions below to sign up for Jones’ newsletter and get access to her “Troublemaker Toolkit” via e-mail. Visit https://luvvie.org/books/professional-

troublemaker/ for more information, scroll down to the “Get the Resources” tab, and type in your contact information. You must subscribe to her listserv to receive the downloadable goodies that permit you to create your mission statement and oriki.

Brick by Brick: Laying Down Foundation

AGuidingFramework:CriticalCulturalWealthModelofAcademic andCareerDevelopment

First-generation college students often bring nuanced histories, sociopolitical realities, and culturally based assets that many universities are unprepared to fully meet, affirm, and serve. Despite the efforts of organizations like NASPA’s2 Center for First-Generation Student Success (now rebranded and re-named as the First-Gen Forward Foundation), which addresses policy issues for first-generation students (NASPA & The Sunder Foundation, 2021), universities still struggle to meet the needs of this growing demographic. Many first-gen serving programs on college campuses tend to be one-person shows or are in their toddler phases, and although the push for services is increasing on a national scale, there’s much “good trouble” (John Lewis) to still get into. For example, in the 2015-2016 academic year, 56% of undergraduates were first-generation students, but only 42% of those who graduated were first-generation graduates (RTI International, 2019; 2021). Clearly, these statistical odds are not entirely in our favor, and these numbers only further prove that evidence-based practices and critical research are needed to capture the profundity of this significant and understudied population. Anyone down to do some research with us? *wink, wink*

Although first-gen-centric research has been developed and more is to come, we at First To Go have been seeking ways to understand how the conversation around career education intentionally collides with that of social justice. Specifically, we’ve been wondering what frameworks can help us critique how forms of oppression operate on college campuses and how those forms of oppression can influence how we think about academic and career success. Research regarding the latter is still in its baby phase, but a few folks have been trying to offer their thoughts and theories regarding this conversation for quite some time. Enter here, Dr. Patton Garriott a true scholar homie and firstgen advocate who has been finding many angles to discuss what this handbook is trying to convey. To do this, Garriott created a framework titled the “Critical Cultural Wealth Model of Academic and Career Success,” which we’ll refer to as the CCWM from now. It includes four dimensions: structural and institutional conditions, social-emotional experiences, career self-authorship, and cultural wealth.

Before we explain each of the CCWM’s dimensions, it’s important to know why we chose this framework to guide this handbook. Principally, Garriott’s CCWM challenges traditional frameworks that overlook important sociopolitical factors (Garriott, 2020). It focuses on the histories, sensibilities, and responsibilities that shape first-generation students’ stories and futures, offering an interdisciplinary approach that honors the specific needs but most importantly the strengths that first-generation students bring to many spaces.

Beyond this, because so much of old-school, traditional literature often blames first-generation students for their struggles, there is a need to check that long-held narrative at the door. We’re not doing that anymore. Not here. So, Garriott’s CCWM flips the script. The CCWM, with all its academic speak, gives us the stable platform to begin asking, and asking loudly, why institutions fail these

2 NASPA stands for the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. It is a professional organization for student affairs administrators in higher education. NASPA provides professional development, advocacy, and research in the field of student affairs. Check them out! Cool people, cool stuff, even cooler knowledge.

students instead (Garriott, 2020). This shift is crucial for understanding and addressing the broader, systemic issues affecting our success, friends. We bring this to you not to bore you (I hope) but to ensure you have a set of words, connections, and a framework to begin advocating for yourself and your community with the proper backup needed to elevate our testimonies. Still with us? Cool.

As mentioned, the CCWM features four dimensions. The first dimension, structural and institutional conditions, highlights five forms of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (Garriott, 2020; Young, 2013). These forms of oppression hinder first-generation students and must be understood to create equitable opportunities. To understand these five forms of oppression, Garriot helps us by offering a few examples of how these forms can come to look like:

• Exploitation:Garriott (2020) defined exploitation as “the degree to which FGEM students’ time and efforts are taken advantage of for the benefit of others” (p. 84).

o Example: First-generation students often work long hours to fund their education, benefiting employers but marginalizing the students economically (Garriott, 2020).

• Marginalization: Marginalization “captures [the] exclusion from campus activities and resources as well as discrimination based on one’s identity” (p. 84).

o Example: Students who cannot access the funding, time, or resources to actively participate in academic and career-building experiences.

• Powerlessness:Powerlessness “refers to one’s perceived authority, status, and sense of self. It is reflective of one’s ability to make influential decisions and their sense of respect from others” (Young, 2013, p. 56, as cited in Garriott, 2020, p. 84).

o Example: Rising tuition costs and classism can make higher education feel out of reach for students (Garriott, 2020).

• CulturalImperialism: Cultural imperialism refers to “the imposition of dominant higher education norms on FGEM (First-Generation and Economically Marginalized students” (Garriott, 2020, p. 84).

o Example: Dominant higher education norms, like individualism and capitalism, can alienate first-generation students (Garriott, 2020).

• Violence: Violence refers to “the actual experience and fear of violence based on one’s identity. This may include physical violence as well as ‘harassment, intimidation, or ridicule simply for the purpose of degrading, humiliating, or stigmatizing group members’ (Young, 2013, p. 46)."

o Example: Students may experience harassment and discrimination, exacerbated by sociopolitical climates (Garriott, 2020).

We talk about this in the career handbook because sus forms of structural and institutional conditions (Oooh, like that use of framework language?!) are rampant not only on college campuses but also running unhinged in career spaces. This is why we ask you to open those big, brain eyes (Vivid mental picture, huh?) to carefully observe and critically act on naming forms of oppression because doing so

can make visible how knowledge, language, power, and privilege continue to derail our first-gen uprise, our attempts at defining ourselves, and our efforts to nurture a generation of professional troublemakers (Luvvie Ajai Jones).

Social-Emotional Experiences:

Garriott’s (2020) social-emotional experiences dimension explores the psychological aspects of firstgeneration students’ lives. Like the last dimension, this dimension also has a lot to say. It is divided into three sub-dimensions: campus cultural fit, normative capital, and school-family integration.

• CampusCulturalFit:This refers to how engaged and welcomed first-generation students feel at their university. Feelings of engagement are often dictated and/or alienated by the type of traditions present at a university traditions often designed for more privileged students (Garriott, 2020).

• NormativeCapital:This concept describes the hidden curriculum and campus know-how that first-generation students might be missing because campus culture assumes students come in with an understanding of how campus life works, such as knowing where to find academic support or how to navigate office hours (Garriott, 2020).

• School-FamilyIntegration:This tension deals with the emotional challenges first-generation students face when balancing college life with family expectations, often experiencing “family achievement guilt” (Garriott, 2020). It’s a next level guilt one that’ll have its very own chapter.

The “emotional stuff” that many of us have “icked” lingers deep, often having nowhere to escape from until it does. Many of us have felt how heavy the emotional escape heist feels in our bodies when our emotions get sick of us and try to break free. Because our bodies hold so much inherited and experienced pain and the memory of pain, entering spaces like college campuses and eventual workforces often throw us into webs, and webs, and webs of experiencing trauma, unraveling trauma, and if we have the resources and support to do so, healing from trauma. As such, we need this dimension to sort social and emotional experiences and how those experiences can influence the formation of your academic and career success. Needless to say, college campuses must rush their arrival to this world that keeps on worlding because our collective social-emotional experiences keep getting more and more complex.

Career Self-Authorship:

Welcome to the third dimension, readers. It’s the dimension that keeps many of us up at night. Career self-authorship involves analyzing structural forces, feeling a sense of control and agency, and having confidence in solving problems and making life choices (Garriott, 2020). These skills are essential for us as first-generation students and graduates, who often have to carve out unique approaches to attaining our career education. According to Garriott’s (2020) research, career self-authorship also has a lot to do with the idea of career adaptability, which “includes concern about one’s career development, control over one’s career decisions, curiosity about one’s fit within the world of work, and confidence in one's ability to execute academic and career choices (Savickas, 2005)” (p. 87). All things that feel like they need an answer or several success met. These things often feel unspoken about in a structured, reflective, and consistent way throughout a college journey. All things that feel disconnected because it's often thought about individually, not collectively in community.

Cultural Wealth:

This last dimension, cultural wealth, is an ode to the greats. We say that because it builds on an incredible scholar’s previous model (Shout out to Dr. Tara Yosso and their Community Cultural Wealth model (2005)), which focuses on the assets and strengths of systemically marginalized students.

With Yosso (2005) backing Garriott up, Garriott (2020) further critiqued higher education practitioners' tendency to seek what is wrong with first-generation students. Instead, Garriott asks readers to examine how and why first-generation college students persist in higher education when that same space and culture has caused them harm.

As we wrap up this chapter, it’s important to keep stressing what we know to be true: That first-gen+ journeys are shaped by nuanced histories, sociopolitical realities, and culturally rooted strengths often overlooked and misperceived by universities. While initiatives like the First-Gen Forward Foundation are making strides in addressing many first-gen+ scholarship and practice gaps, a significant jigsaw piece is still missing between what's needed and what's provided. This chapter has laid the groundwork for understanding how crucial it is to bring personalized, first-gen+ career education into the conversation, particularly when the latter intersects with the teachings and applications of social justice. The Critical Cultural Wealth Model of Academic and Career Success (CCWM) assists us with merging career education with systemic critique, as its framework offers a roadmap to critically examine the structural and institutional barriers that impact our paths. But more than that, the CCWM empowers us to challenge and recreate the narrative that readily places the burden of struggle solely on our shoulders. As first-generation students, we bring incredible insight, community-driven energy, and cultural wealth to the infamous table assets that should be recognized and nurtured in our academic journeys and career development. By embracing frameworks like the CCWM, we can begin to spur conversations that will catalyze different versions of educational and career environments that reflect and support the diverse realities of first-generation students in its makeup. It’s time (overdue) to ensure that our strengths get recognized and highlighted, that our experiences are acknowledged and centered, and that our success is not just anticipated but fully realized. The CCWM is a reminder that educators must “never forget that justice is what love looks like in public” (West, 2010) and that the love bubbling up in first-generation advocacy is not a new concept but a growing one that can no longer be ignored.

Pause&GroundActivity:

Assessing our Foundation

Self-awareness and career awareness are critical to successful career exploration and vocational discernment. The following activities provide a framework for deepening self-awareness about career/vocation awareness.

Foundation Setting #1

Select a career or field of interest, Google the top 4-5 skills needed in this field, and create a chart to map out answers to the following questions – 1) What are the identities that are most salient to me, 2) What are the assets that these identities have helped to develop in me, 3) How do these assets map to the requirements and needs of my field/career of interest?

“Sample”

Chart Field/Career: Screenwriting

Required Skills: Persistence, Creativity, Flexibility, Research, Communication

What identities are most salient to me?

What are the assets that these identities have helped to develop in me?

How do these assets map to the requirements and needs of my field/career?

Race – African American Resiliency Screenwriters experience a lot of rejection in their careers; resilience is an essential skill/trait needed if I want to make it in the field.

Foundation Setting #2

Go to LinkedIn and search for information about your field of interest. Look for profiles of people with shared identities. Select an individual and message them to request an informational interview. In this interview ask them questions regarding their experience(s) navigating the field, paying special attention to their identities and world view.

Flipping All the Scripts: There Are Some Things We Got To Say

By this point, we’ve given you our reasons why we wrote this mini manual and the “guardrails” or framework guiding this handbook. However, before we dig into the following three chapters of this e-book, we wanted to end this “Part 1” with ways we already think you are challenging mainstream notions of what your career vocation process should look and end up like. So, as this chapter’s title indicates, there are things we got to say. They include 1) reminding you that there are questions we have to keep asking as the world continues to shift, 2) that our community is far beyond a monolithic one, and 3) that our identities are our guides, our North Stars, and they are capable of creating bridges of connection. We leave you with these reminders because vocation discovery has much to do with how we deep-dive internally and connect the correlations externally. These reminders, we hope, can help bring us back when the overstimulation of the outside world makes us believe that we are too lacking, too different. As you continue to pave mental space to think about what your career vocation can look like, take a moment to realize that your first-gen+ essence has given you many tools needed to engage with this discovery. You know how to come up with the questions, acknowledge the power of community, and show up with drive and purpose you have what you need. So, as you read these reminders, we ask that you look at what’s missing in these conversations and go start them. The vocation to advocate and pursue a just world requires that kind of courage, and we have it.

ThisPerfectlyEngineeredStructuralMess&ItsArchnemesis: Questions

Clelia O. Rodriguez, in their book, “Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression, and Pain,” gave us these beginning lines on the first page of their book:

“Every word inscribed in this book comes from experiences I have lived, breathed, felt, imagined, inherited, seeded, sustained, birthed, dreamed, watered, fired, stepped on, painted, burned, and healed. This text is about many texts. It’s a reading about many readings” (2018, p. ix).

Rodriguez’s words map the way we see the vocational undertaking. Our stories and history fuel the paths we pave and the newness we encounter. Our lives are not a one-person story but the accumulation of many stories. What’s left unwritten comes down to the way we honor those stories along the way.

To understand how first-generation college students view our journey to vocation, we must delve into the history of higher education (a significantly brief version of it, anyway) the setting and culture that has centered career mobility as its outcome for decades. Education, notably higher education, “in the United States was created to instill particular, social class-based values and behaviors into privileged, wealthy, and aristocratic White men to prepare them to lead their families, churches, and communities” (Hurst, 2012; Rudolph, 1990 as cited in Ardoin & martinez, 2019, p. 21). A reality whose legacies we are still navigating and learning to challenge today, as our history asks us to closely examine “the larger sociopolitical processes and ideologies that facilitate and impede access to rights for historically marginalized groups” (Perez Huber, 2016, p. 215). As the purpose of education has evolved over centuries, it continues to stand as a marker of privilege and power. Yet this marker is riddled with intersecting factors that continue to hinder equitable access to higher education and the

creation of justice-driven educational experiences that respond to the changing landscape of university life, how we define career “ success, ” and how we identify as change agents. As a tiny snapshot of our history and present, we remind you that you, students, have grappled and continue grappling with:

• limited access issues such as modern-day segregation and limited enrollment slots in colleges and universities;

• educational disparities in resource allocation in TK-12 and post-secondary settings caused by discriminatory local and federal policies and practices;

• financial roadblocks in the form of high tuition costs, staggering student debt, and minimized financial funding sources;

• cultural and social barriers that are driven by hidden curricula and exclusionary norms that dimmish the familial, resistance, and cultural capital students enter academia with;

• retention and completion challenges that often entirely blame students for their circumstances rather than the institution; and

• constant attacks toward existing policy and advocacy efforts that thwart and threaten firstgen+ student presence and assets to our nation’s campuses.

The weight of these factors is significant because as our community steps into the university realm, members of our population carry with them the weight of history and its current-day legacies a history and stark reality that shape worldviews and needs as folks enter our academic settings. This struggle for access and multi-century battle against exclusion has imbued first-gen+ students past and present with innovation and determination. The combination of these characteristics are invaluable assets not often recognized by academia, but assets that need to be highlighted for their strength in conveying the values and practices of community, accomplice-ship, and collective power, all elements that elevate a first-gen+ students’ individual journey to a story of many. Turning this journey from a singular individual's path to a path that cannot be paved without the hands and stories of others.

Yet, higher education, like other industries, can mischaracterize student populations worthy of deeper exploration past what has been normalized in data or scholarship. For example, data about college-educated folks often reports that folks with a college degree “are more likely to vote, to own a home, to send their own children to college, and to engage in work that offers both financial security and meaning” (Hout, 2020; Hurst, 2010 as cited in Jehangir et al., 2022, p. 104). Yet, that reality is not always the case. Attending college and earning a well-fought-for degree does not always translate into the future students and their families may have been conditioned to believe in, and that reality is one that alumni often grapple with without structured support and the presence of community. And despite emerging as a new majority in university settings, first-gen+ students are still leaving college “with more significant debt, are more likely to be underemployed, and cannot gain entry to engines of economic prosperity and purpose as can their non-first-generation counterparts” (Hurst, 2015; Walpole, 2003 as cited in Jehangir et al., 2022, p. 104). Given this reality, many economically and racially marginalized students navigate their college experience as the systemic double-edged sword that it is: Not often having the economic access to afford the educational, professional, and experiential opportunities associated with college and postgraduate success and taking on the massive responsibility of paying back the funds utilized to pay for their inequitable “basic package” education. This leads us to continuously ask, how are higher education institutions equipping themselves to be first-gen+ student-ready? Are our institutions responding to the complexity of the first-gen+ experience? Are we preparing our first-gen graduates to transition to workplace settings that do not seem equipped to understand graduates' assets, contributions, and perspectives? Considering these

questions, our community aims to beckon higher education institutions to get specific with what they mean by “career education.” Career education, vocation discovery, for who and how do we get there?

YouCan’tKeepBunchingUsTogether

The first-generation identity is as complex as it is invisible. The community is not frequently defined by what we possess but by what has been denied and/or what folks are perceived to lack. What is often purposely missed is the reality that the first-gen identity is sculpted by exclusion and marked by persistence, making folx trailblazers in a world that often feels unknown. The first-gen+ experience is a continuously unchartered map of experiences, languages, cultures, and identities. But above all, the term “first-generation” embraces a diverse array of stories that enrich the academic landscape by inviting multiple perspectives into the fold.

Although the first-generation student identity and community cannot be approached as a monolithic or a “catch-all” student population, a considerable amount of first-gen+ students are racialized students from economically marginalized communities and backgrounds (Tate et al., 2015). Therefore, for students identifying as “first-generation+” first-generation students who carry additional identities (e.g., first-generation + economically marginalized) completing a “college degree is clearly tied to employability and mental wellness” (Tate et al., 2015, p. 294). Any perceived failure to attain a meaningful and financially stable career is often equated to dishonoring loved ones ’ sacrifices and failing their respective communities in need. Complicating this further is the lack of strengths-based research, frameworks, advocacy, and programmatic efforts surrounding how to support this identity-intersectional group. So, what does this mean about how we should push forward?

In higher education, pushing forward advocating forward means valuing how firstgeneration college students can come to stand united by their shared experience while simultaneously asking university and workplace settings to respond to folk’s diverse needs. Community members’ varied cultural capital enriches educational discourses, challenging conventional wisdom and sparking innovative approaches.

As increasing numbers of first-gen+ students cross the threshold into academia, they not only enter an unfamiliar world but also carry a toolkit of unique skills and knowledge that can reshape that world. Their shared journey empowers them to collaborate, empathize, and dismantle barriers a testament to the strength that emerges when diverse experiences unite toward a common goal.

In merging sustainable collaboration with tailored support services for first-generation and first-generation+ students, higher education practitioners alongside the community can create environments that engage student voices. These environments can not only involve first-gen+ students in decision-making processes and think-tank sessions, but they can proactively incorporate students as the frontrunners of services themselves. From centering student-engineered, student-led programming, taskforces, research groups, curriculum developers, advisory board representatives, and student organization leaders on the frontlines to involving them in the way we formulate new frameworks and study the first-gen+ experience, institutions can construct a more comprehensive approach to constructing initiatives that are genuinely and sustainably student-informed. Not only does this provide an institution thorough insight into the first-gen+ experience, but it also permits students to gain multifaceted transferable skills, deep insight into the procedures occurring inside conference rooms and meetings that make a university what it is, but also facilitates a possibility for

forming established, non-authoritative relationships between high-level decision makers and students whose input can transform how university cultures operate.

It is, too, crucial for you the student to view yourself as a colleague and educator. Although the weight of having you inform your educational institution about how to serve you should not fall on your shoulders, there is great significance and power in vocalizing your realities. The vocalization of those realities becomes a sense-making tool for others to formulate their thoughts, process their trajectories, and practice a consistent sharing of their perspectives. Being able to be sustained partners in fashioning new first-gen ready cultures provides a moldable blueprint for others to critique what currently exists and catalyzes us the practitioners that aim to accompany you to try to reach new heights in our initiative improvement and/or building spaces. It is imperative to name that it is not, in any way, your job to be a perpetual spokesperson for your community, but when the bandwidth exists to be a part of a student-led movement or energy to get higher education cultures to be accountable to your needs and narratives, know that you are joining a growing first-gen nation that is committed to re-writing what others have depicted us to be. There is no “one size fits all” approach with us, and that begins with being extra loud about the “+” in “first-gen+.”

TheIdentitiesareClashing– LetThem.

W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the experience of African Americans navigating an identity split between their perspective and that imposed upon them by society. Leaning on “double consciousness,” first-generation college students often straddle multiple worlds: that of their family and community and that of higher education (among others). Get’s to be a lot, we know….This duality, though, enriches our perspective, granting us the ability to perceive the world through multifaceted lenses. Straddling this in-betweenness allows us first-gen+ students and graduates to transition from a constant state of survival to developing an evolving critical consciousness aware of how marginalizing forces operate in our day-to-day realities and that of our communities.

As we resist marginalization, we find ourselves constantly unlearning and challenging hostile environments that portray our diverse identities as deficient. For many of us who are racially and economically marginalized first-gen students, this journey involves continuously assessing the privilege of higher education while navigating and coping with the dominant cultures around us. This systeminduced mental gymnastics inevitably takes its toll. Being both privileged and marginalized means that we carry not only our feelings, understanding, and perceptions but are often expected to educate and raise awareness about the validity of our experiences to those who minimize our realities and underestimate our contributions. Yet, we wield the power of drawing from multiple perspectives and navigating different spaces, privileges, and ideologies qualities that make us needed community leaders and advocates inside and outside the classroom. Our “in-betweenness” is rarely recognized as a skill. However, our ability to make sense of our realities, bridge communities, and create opportunities that break cyclical struggles makes us authentic, under-explored powerhouses. This unique position offers insight into disparities and opportunities that may have remained hidden or overlooked.

Understanding how we merge, learn from, create, and cope with the many worlds identities within us is essential in shaping how we wish to present ourselves in the workplace. As we come to terms with the fact that, as first-generation professionals, we do have a deep understanding of impostor syndrome (which we will call “impostorization”), mentoring, networking, and navigating

workforce politics, we become more agile at handling this new world of work (Wallace, 2022, p. 4). Why? Because we often lived, and live, those realities. Live needing to defy impostorization (Part 2 here we come!), needing to figure out how to connect and who to connect with, and needing to navigate environments to eventually challenge them in our big and small ways. We are influencers, often more than we realize or give ourselves credit for. We shape how academic and workplace settings can evolve away from alienating practices, how our communities can shift their self-perception, and how we can foster cultures of possibility, accountability, and critical reflection. For us, “lift as you rise” isn’t just a passing thought it’s a guiding principle. Therefore, the call to action is to make room for the identities that society has taught us to see as “too much,” “not enough,” or “too backward.” By drawing on our lived experiences and understanding the histories of our varied identities, we gain the insight needed to navigate “new challenges, including bureaucracy and politics, managing budgets, developing networks to prepare for job transitions, finding sponsors and mentors,…defining our next career steps” (Wallace, 2022, p. 6), and so much more. This is but the very start.

Pause&Ground:

• Describe a time when you felt the tension of double consciousness in your academic journey. What did you learn from it?

• How has your family’s background and expectations shaped your identity as a student and a future professional?

• What strategies have you developed to help you navigate your identities?

• How do you envision your professional identity evolving as you graduate and enter your chosen career field?

Goal Setting: Write down five concrete goals or actions you can take to further develop your professional identity while staying true to the other parts of yourself.

PART 2

Hey! You made it to part two. Love it. Just a tiny F.Y.I.: This section will feel slightly different from part one. While part one wanted to offer some starting lines for this conversation, part two gets a little more specific. In these following three chapters, you’ll be taken through 3 different, yet connected, realities: 1) Family Achievement Guilt, 2) Myth of Meritocracy, and 3) Impostorization. Each of these three chapters represents an internal process you must engage in and be open to further examining. Each of these three chapters holds emotions thoroughly engrained in our way of operating in our many worlds.

Although written in a tone that conveys a bit of levity, these chapters will ask you to assess the script you’ve been dictated to write out of survival and/or necessity and choose to either feed that script or flip it. Neither option is easy, and the work will only partially play out on these pages, but deciding what to feed or flip is required if you want to approach your search for a vocation in an accountable and responsible manner. The values we contain, the principles that lead us, and the ideologies that persist are influenced by how we interpret what we think of ourselves, and in turn, we must learn how those interpretations came to be.

In their book Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, authors Cara Page and Erica Woodland remind us that we do not have to do internal care alone or figure out the algorithm of the interpretations above alone. Specifically, in their chapter “Uninterrupted Legacy of Resistance," Erica Woodland tells us to center the energy of Sankofa.3, for in

“the spirit of Sankofa, we honor our ancestors and elders by claiming our lineage [of resistance]. This memory work can show what is possible when revolutionary care is at the center of our liberation work. What can we learn and adapt from the revolutionary work of the 1960s and 1970s to shape our understanding of healing justice? How can these lessons sharpen our strategies for movement building, organizing, healing, care, and protection” (2023, p. 40).

Remember, you have the tools you need to engage in a search for vocation with intention. You have the ancestors and elders present with you, too. The last thing we’d want is for y’all to read through these chapters and think that this work is to be done in isolation. Quite the opposite, and mainly because a search for a career, a search for a vocation, is also a search for justice a relentlessness that we carry in our intergenerational memory from the resistance work of our communities. And because the search for inquiry is that, relentless, here are a few questions that we hope will frame your thoughts in the chapters to come:

1) How do we pursue a radically loving world in one of the areas of life that seems so desired, like a career?

3 Sankofa is “an Akan word from Ghana which means ‘go back and get it.’ It emphasizes the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to make positive progress” (Morrison, 2014, p. 46). It stresses and “teaches us that we must return to our roots to move forward. Whether we consider Sankofa as a process of recovering historical knowledge or as a metaphor for retrieving cultural practices, it represents a philosophy that places value on remembering and reclaiming” (Temple, 2010, p. 89).

2) How can we see forms of career education as a gateway to unearthing engrained feelings about family, community, merit, accomplishment, self-perception, and belief?

3) How do we combat capitalism’s legacies through our career/vocational choices and life paths in a societal order riddled with capitalistic norms and practices?

The following few chapters could be the dodgeball that tips us over into wanting to investigate a few answers to the questions above. But if not, for now, know these conversations are worthy of existing within you. That’s how we honor the work of the past and the now and set up the scene for the future.

Ah, yes, the feels. About that…

Let’s talk Family: Understanding Family Achievement Guilt and its Influences on Career Building Processes

The decision to pursue higher education is never a solitary one. It’s a choice that sends ripples through families and communities, often requiring contributions and sacrifices from everyone involved. As first-generation students, we frequently find ourselves carrying not just our own dreams but also the aspirations of those who came before us parents and guardians who may not have had the same opportunities yet who invest their hopes in our educational journey. These sacrifices underscore a deep commitment and a shared vision for an unknown but highly awaited future.

We know that family-based relationships are essential in helping us, as first-generation students, understand who we are, even though there might be tensions along the way. Studies consistently show that these relationships, despite any challenges, play a crucial role in shaping our sense of self. Researchers like Ryan and Ream (2016) have pointed out the educational benefits of parents’ cognitively and emotionally supportive interactions with their children (p. 956–957). Many of us rely on the motivation from our families to push ourselves further, to achieve more than we might have thought possible (Tang et al., 2013). These aspirations, which have become expectations, are a measure of how far we believe we can go (Spees et al., 2017, p. 458). But with these ambitions comes a whirlwind of changes changes that we, along with our families, often find ourselves unprepared to fully navigate, both emotionally and mentally.

And yet, the moment we set foot on a college campus, we gain a “privileged status that many...have both envied and feared their entire lives,” as Pratt et al. (2019) describe it (p. 111). This is the same status that has added complexity to our family dynamics, making us feel different, possibly even inferior since we were young. As we work to adapt to academic life and, eventually, career life, the expectations from home don’t just vanish they clash with our new realities, sometimes creating divides between us and our families.

To further illustrate the complexities that first-gen+ students face while merging academic and home identities, it’s essential to explore the concept of family achievement guilt, as described by Covarrubias and Fryberg (2015) and Jehangir (2010). Family achievement guilt occurs when we realize the stark differences between our home environments and the university setting. Covarrubias and Fryberg (2015) reference Piorkowski (1983) in explaining how some of us feel like survivors for having distanced ourselves from complex home environments that, perhaps, didn’t always align with our larger goals. This separation, however, often spurs a sense of guilt. We’re now in different spaces that offer opportunities for wellness, success, and stability in middle-to upper-class settings. At the same time, our families remain in the environments we felt we had to leave behind. This guilt is compounded by the awareness that we’ve surpassed our family’s status, achieving a level of privilege that highlights the daily struggles they continue to face.

Family achievement guilt remains a largely underexplored area in research. Few studies have examined how this guilt manifests differently across racially and ethnically marginalized groups a

gap that, if filled, could greatly benefit practitioners and researchers who work with first-gen+ students (Covarrubias & Fryberg, 2015). However, until more community-led scholarship is developed, we continue juggling the complexities of family achievement guilt and are often confronted with new challenges. These challenges remind us that our journey through college is not just for ourselves but for the family members who sacrificed so much to see us succeed against the odds (Spees et al., 2017). Yet, the gap between our lived experiences and the support offered by higher education institutions often leaves us without the resources needed to navigate these internal struggles (Covarrubias & Fryberg, 2015).

For first-gen+ students, especially those from migrant backgrounds, the reminders of family sacrifices are constant. Families often emphasize that our education is a means to a better life, so we won’t have to work as hard or in the same way as our parents (Nuñez & Sansone, 2016, p. 101). However, balancing these expectations with our divided identities while striving to achieve our “best, most authentic” selves (Jehangir, 2010) places a significant strain on us. The pressure to manage these multiple identities while surviving in predominantly White, affluent academic spaces is a recurring theme in the first-gen+ experience. Unfortunately, many institutional environments have yet to fully recognize, name, and address the daily realities first-generation students face. Without proper visibility and support, these piercing worlds we carry within us will continue to go unacknowledged and unhealed.

As we gradually step into a transition phase from academic life into the professional world, the presence of family achievement guilt doesn’t simply disappear just because we crossed that graduation stage it evolves, manifesting in new ways we may not have been fully prepared for as we navigate our careers, our vocations. The guilt that once stemmed from the disparity between our university lives, and home environments now intertwine with the pressures of entering and advancing in our chosen vocations. Questions around honoring sacrifices inevitably come up, and for those of us who placed “honoring sacrifices” as our primary drive and motivation, these questions hit a hidden place in us that we often silence due to the emotions attached to that place. Silent yet pervasive mental and emotional concerns may arise once you start asking, “Did I make my loved ones proud by going down this path?” “What if I won't be able to give back to my family the way I was hoping for?” “What if I didn’t utilize my time in college the way I should have?” You owe it to the self you are building and actualizing to address these questions because your future self is counting on your present self to clarify what success means to you. Guilt can derail that clarity because it is influenced by what dominant cultures deem as “actual” success. When we can’t fully “achieve,” or want to attain, what we have been indoctrinated to believe as success (i.e., class and financial mobility), how do we return from that reality or choice? The blueprint of making amends with feelings of guilt requires you to discern and speak about what “actual” success means to you. Your life has ultimate significance, and the moment we enter the vocation-building process with actionable steps to addressing the emotions we may have suppressed, the career-building process can become the time of vocational growth and self-actualization you have always deserved.

Yet, the intersection of family achievement guilt and vocation-building is particularly pronounced when we start making career choices that may diverge from our family’s expectations or understanding. You are a trailblazer not only in name but also in action. And when you blaze trails, the path revealed is one that many including your loved ones do not know how to describe or comprehend. You are creating a viable language for the experiences you are living as you live them, and that movement is building a legacy that will allow others to keep running forward. At times, it may feel like the desire to pursue vocations that align with our passions and values can sometimes

feel like a betrayal of the sacrifices our families made, and that realization can sometimes slam into you. For instance, choosing a career that might not be as financially lucrative or socially prestigious as our families had hoped can intensify feelings of guilt, but how you come to speak about the experience can be one of many antidotes to that guilt. How you connect with your larger community of trailblazers can speak to parts inside of you that may have felt too taboo to talk about with those you love. How you come to walk in alignment with your call is an entryway to a place that theologian Frederick Buechner asks us to consider: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” We may worry that our career choices are insufficient to justify the hardships our families endured to support our education. Still, that worry has the right to be expressed to avoid stagnating our chosen life.

Moreover, there will be moments when the actual professional success we achieve can further compound these feelings of guilt. As we climb the career ladder, gaining promotions, accolades, and potential financial stability, we may become acutely aware of the widening gap between our lives and those of our family members. From gaining access to different conversations to different connections to different experiences, the feeling of further becoming a “stranger” within your home can intensify. You may be experiencing, or have experienced, that form of emotional-mental alienation and distance when in college, but once you realize that your life continues to run perpendicular and not fully parallel to your family history, you begin to tap into various forms of consciousness. The consciousness that reminds you that you hold new identities your loved ones may not have, and even then, this consciousness runs alongside the potential desire to remain rooted to who you are and where you come from. These forms of consciousness may feel like opposing forces to one another, but the hope is that you’ll move from seeing them as opponents and instead as informants. Here is a moment to reframe: Some aspects of your life may run perpendicularly to your family’s life, but you are connected at the center of that graph. You will always share an intersection point. So, navigate your worlds creatively, for those worlds purposefully collide to remind you that the collective will always connect us more than individuality ever can. Although this awareness can sometimes lead us to emotional dissonance, where we struggle to reconcile our achievements with the persistent inequities that our families continue to face, that dissonance can bring you back to a space of justice work to address the root causes of the latter.

The notion of “repaying sacrifices made” or “giving back” to our families and communities often becomes a central theme in our career stories. While rooted in love and gratitude, this sense of ongoing obligation and responsibility can add another layer of pressure that may be difficult to process as you are snowboarding the rest of the other emotional avalanches. We may feel a spoken or unspoken duty to use our professional trajectories to lift as we rise, whether by providing financial support, offering guidance, or becoming the token family role model. However, this responsibility can sometimes conflict with our aspirations for personal growth and fulfillment, leading to difficult choices about where and how to direct our energy, time, and resources.

Navigating these mental-emotional landscapes requires a commitment to many processes of introspection, and often, that introspection leads us to create new support systems. While our families may have been our primary source of motivation and support during our academic journey, the career phase often calls for additional networks that understand and validate the unique realities we face as first-gen+ professionals. The practice of creating webs of support is significant at this stage because the broader workplace culture, much like the academic environment, is not always equipped to recognize or address the experiences that first-gen+ professionals face. The myth of meritocracy, too, runs amok in work cultures, and it becomes a true energy vampire in many professional settings,

perpetuating the belief that success is purely a result of individual effort and draining the belief needed to create alternate, caring relationships. The additional emotional labor that first-gen+ individuals must perform to reconcile their professional achievements with their family dynamics, on top of figuring out who to trust and who to collaborate with in a work setting, can push many mentalemotional boundaries that are often not fully fortified. As a result, creating and maintaining support systems within many workplaces is seen as a lifeline, but unfortunately, many workplace environments offer inadequate opportunities for community building, and many of our community members continue to navigate these challenges largely on their own.

To move forward, we as individuals and the institutions we participate in must acknowledge and address the impact of family achievement guilt on our career-building processes. This means creating proactive, consistent, accessible, and holistic spaces where emerging and established firstgen+ professionals can openly discuss their experiences, seek guidance, and develop strategies for managing these nuanced and intersecting emotions. But beyond space creation, the call is for a more significant shift toward organizational changes that challenge the “you do you, and I do me” mentality, strays away from the “fake it until you make it” pitfall, and recognizes that success is based on the whole-person and their wellness, their diverse backgrounds, and their community-gifted assets.

In conclusion, the crossing from academia to the professional world is intensely intertwined with the emotional backdrops we have inherited from our families. As first-gen+ individuals, our vocational paths are not just about personal success they are about honoring the sacrifices of those who came before us while forging a future that is true to our values and search for connection and justice. By embedding a more extensive examination of the role of family achievement guilt in our career-building process, we can begin to navigate these journeys with greater clarity and purpose, ensuring that our vocational lives are rooted, grounded, fulfilling, and reflective of our complex identities and those who join us in those identities.

Pause&GroundActivity:

Thinking Through Family Achievement Guilt

As a first-generation college student, you are embarking on a significant journey that brings you many opportunities to pause and ground if we welcome the practice of doing so. The following exercises allow you to reflect on your experiences and needs and prepare you for sharing your thoughts and feelings with your loved ones.

Releasing the Guilt #1

Write a heartfelt letter addressing your gratitude, challenges, fears, goals, needs, and limitations. Once you’re done, you can share it with your loved ones or keep it for yourself and review it whenever feelings of guilt surface.

• Gratitude:Expressing your appreciation for the contributions and sacrifices your family/loved ones have made to support your education. Acknowledge how their efforts have contributed to your ability to attend college.

• Challenges:Discuss the unique challenges you face as a first-generation college student. These might include navigating the college system, balancing academic and personal responsibilities, and feeling pressured to succeed.

• Fears:Share the fears and anxieties you experience in your college journey. This could involve concerns about academic performance, fitting in, or managing financial obligations.

• Goals:Outline your goals and aspirations for the future. Explain how your college education is crucial in achieving these goals and how it will benefit you and your family.

• Support:Offer specific suggestions on how your family can support you during college. This could include emotional support, understanding your time constraints, or providing encouragement.

• Limitations:Explain the limitations you face due to your demanding school workload. Help your family understand why you might only sometimes be available or able to participate in family activities as much as you would like.

This letter is to be used however you see fit. Write it in the tone that most authentically expresses your thoughts and feelings. If you plan to share it with a loved one, be thoughtful of your audience without sacrificing your truth. This exercise can reflect an important step in bridging the gap between your college life and your family’s understanding of your experience. It can help them see your perspective and provide you with the support you need to succeed.

Releasing the Guilt #2

This journal prompt is designed to help you envision your future success and reflect on the journey to get there. By writing a letter from the perspective of your future self, you can clarify your goals and identify the steps needed to achieve them.

Prompt:

Imagine yourself 10 years from now. You've achieved your career goals, built a life you’re proud of, and overcame challenges that once seemed daunting. Now, write a letter from your future self to your present self, describing how you accomplished everything you set out to do. In your letter, consider the following:

1. What are the specific goals you’ve achieved?

2. What challenges did you face along the way, and how did you overcome them? Reflect on the strategies you used to push through them.

3. What were the key steps or decisions that led to your success? Highlight the actions, choices, and opportunities crucial in helping you reach your goals.

4. What advice does your future self have for your present self? Offer guidance, encouragement, and wisdom from the perspective of someone who has already navigated the journey you’re currently on.

5. How do you feel now that you’ve accomplished your goals? Reflect on the sense of fulfillment, pride, and happiness that comes with achieving your dreams.

Let this letter serve as a source of motivation and a reminder that your future self is counting on you to keep moving forward, even when the path seems challenging. Consider visiting https://www.futureme.org/

What about them bootstraps?

How's that “pull yourself up from those bootstraps” mentality coming along? It is often troubling to see how unchallenged the “work really, really hard and you’ll succeed” narrative remains to stay alive and well. It’s more so alarming how society has effectively upheld the mirage of hard work as the gateway to achieving self-worth and societal recognition. What really blows our mind is how our community phrases of encouragement like “echale ganas” (“Give it your all.”) and “ponte las pilas” (Hustle, “just do it”) (to name a couple) connotate and support cultures of overwork and hyper-productivity many of the phrases often extended as a reminder that our only way to survive is to work and grind. Many of these phrases were shared by loved ones who wanted to ensure that economic suffering and strife wouldn’t be our dealt hand, too. Many of these phrases continue to be shared with love. Still, they are heavily affected by the normalized ways our marginalized communities have internalized that it is only through hard work that one gets options, opportunities...a chance at a different kind of success, one that is more financially and socially mobile.

But here’s the thing, meritocracy (the idea of pulling on those bootstraps and gaining access, entry, success, etc., because you worked your life off for a chance) has been a whispering, little evil minion perched on your shoulder for a very, very, very long time. And this little evil minion hasn’t only been chilling on your shoulder, but that of Western society. In fact, western society gave life to that minion and has deployed it into the psyche of many to bar as many doors as possible. If one has the social, financial, and network capital to walk through doors, then “working hard” has its rewards, but what if one doesn’t have those starting lines or sources of capital to break doors off their hinges? Does that mean you’re not a hard worker? Does that mean you’re not talented, gifted, divinely shined upon, and favored? No, it just means that hard work and effort aren’t the only factors that speak. It means that your genius can be the one to solve this round planet’s problems, but if you don’t have the means to share your genius despite you being a genius and doing whatever you have access to nourish your genius, then, of course, you won’t have the same exact realities as someone who has had the resource-filled environments, paid training and skill-building, hands-on experience, and the overflowing connections that it often takes to get through the infamous door. So, future professional troublemaker, here are some things I hope you remember via the words of other scholars and folks wanting to awaken us from this evil-minion-induced slumber (brace yourself because these folks got stuff to say and you needa hear it):

• “Despite the prevailing myth of equal opportunity, the reality is that race continues to play a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America.” - Dr. Derrick Bell

o Citation: Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books.

• “The idea of meritocracy functions as a way of making sure that inequalities appear to be the result of individual differences, rather than structural ones.” - Dr. Angela Davis

o Citation: Davis, A. (1981). Women, race & class. Vintage Books.

• “Meritocracy is the ideology that legitimate success in society is achieved solely through individual talents and efforts. However, in practice, it often serves to reproduce racial and class inequalities.” - Dr. Edward Bonilla-Silva

o Citation: Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

• “The ideology of meritocracy is used to justify why some succeed and others fail. But it fails to acknowledge the structural barriers that keep certain groups from achieving success.”Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw

o Citation: Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review.

• “The heartbeat of racism is denial. The heartbeat of anti-racism is confession. Our confession: the problem is not the people, it’s the policy. The solution is not improving a racial group. It is changing the policies that halt the advancement of racial groups.” - Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

o Citation: Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World

• “The notion of a meritocracy is created by and for those who feel that they have a right to a certain kind of privilege. It disregards the ways in which systems of power distribute privilege unequally.” - Dr. bell hooks

o hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: Class Matters. Routledge.

• “Meritocracy is a well-disguised aristocracy that perpetuates privilege under the guise of personal achievement.” - Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

o Citation: Cottom, T. M. (2019). Thick: And other essays. The New Press.

• “The myth of meritocracy erases the systemic advantages and disadvantages that people inherit and accumulate, thus justifying inequality as a matter of individual effort.” - Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

o Citation: Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2020). The disordered cosmos: A journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. Bold Type Books.

• “Meritocracy assumes that talent is distributed equally across society and that everyone has an equal chance to succeed. In reality, structural barriers based on race, gender, and class severely limit opportunity.” - Dr. Imani Perry

o Citation: Perry, I. (2021). South to America: A journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation. Ecco.

• “Meritocracy is a comforting lie that obscures the deep-seated racial and economic disparities baked into American society.” - Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad

o Citation: Muhammad, K. G. (2020). The condemnation of Blackness: race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Harvard University Press.

Like how we gave you a whole page of scholars who aren't here to play? We invited them all to the chapter barbeque, and they’ve devoted their vocations to ensure you know there’s more to the

search for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” than meets the eye. We also cited their work if you want to do the “good trouble” follow-up work needed to shift the internal and external forms of deep-seated oppression that guide our every system.

Now that you’ve met some of the homies at the chapter barbeque let’s dive into how their words turned life lessons can help us navigate the high-tide, murky wave of career-building in a societal world that loves to preach and elevate meritocracy but doesn’t always practice what it preaches. You see, rising above the myth of meritocracy isn’t about rejecting or de-valuing the value of hard work (we know what we had to do to get here) it’s about recognizing that hard work alone isn’t the golden ticket to the Willy Wonka Factory of Success (it’s knowing that what you had to give and do to get “here” shouldn’t be normalized). It’s about understanding that the infamous systems are joined by the infamous “-isms,” and this “who achieved more” game is rigged in favor of those who already hold power, and that, as budding change stewards, our mission isn’t just to “climb” the ladder but to dismantle the need for a ladder.

So, how do we rise above…and loudly? First, we need to unlearn certain mindsets. Challenge yourself to let go of the idea that you’re only visible when you work, that you’re only worthy when you churn out milestones. Let go of the idea that you’ll automatically get what you deserve if you just put in enough hours. Instead, embrace the understanding that your worth and dignity aren’t determined by how much you rise and grind but by your ability to question the system while staying true to your values. This means being strategic about your vocational moves and seeking out communities, mentors, and accomplices who understand that this rigged game should be, at best, rid of and, at the very least, overhauled.

Next, we need to build community. We need community. We crave community. We must come to rely on the simple yet unnerving truth that people need people. Meritocracy wants us to believe that this “hustle” is a one-person plan and that “ success ” is an individual pursuit, but the truth is, we can’t exist in isolation. The context of the world is too demanding, often too devasting, and too in need to go about piecing this jigsaw puzzle of a path on your own. Surround yourself with people who uplift you, honor where your stories hail from, and understand that you're not only first-gen in a moment of time but that you are a first-gen forever. And that forever part? It reminds us that you’ll remain ever-changing, and change requires facing turmoil, grief, triumph, and joy with others it’s the only way you stay planted and fortified to go for that next goal.

Finally, we need to find our place in action. Moving forward isn’t solely about writing about moving forward or speaking about moving forward; it is seeking the many chances needed to create little and big moments where the act of moving forward is actually in movement. The myth of meritocracy thrives when we accept things as they are and don’t question, critique, or circumvent the status quo. But you’re not here to accept you ’re here to disrupt. You are a first-gen disrupter. This means engaging career spaces replete with creativity, boundary-pushing, difficult conversations, and generative conflict and uplifting your strengths to innovate while in love and movement.

As you pursue your social justice vocation, remember that your trajectory isn’t just about personal success it’s about passing down the first-gen fire so that others can find their way to their versions of success. It’s about being intentionally disobedient and resisting the ideologies feeding these “bootstrap” systems that have marginalized many. We are each other’s buoys, ensuring that those who come after us don’t have to fight the same battles because new cultures and new ways of

maneuvering the career realm will come from us. It’s about redefining success, not in terms of titles, salaries, or accolades, but in terms of impact and justice.

So, let’s rise above the myth. Let’s redefine and recreate what success means in a world that often measures us by the wrong metrics and perceptions. Let’s build vocations that are fulfilling and transformative for our communities.

Pause&GroundActivity:

Breaking Down the Myth of Meritocracy

This activity aims to have you critically examine the concept of meritocracy, understand its limitations, and explore how societal structures influence individual success. This activity encourages participants to confront how they may have internalized the myth of meritocracy and consider how it shapes their worldview.

Reflecting on Personal Narratives: We’ve all been told at some point that if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything. Phrases like “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or “echale ganas ” (give it your all) have likely been a part of your personal or cultural upbringing. Begin this activity by reflecting on the following prompts:

a. Write about a time when you were told that hard work alone would lead to success.

• How did this advice make you feel at the time?

• Did you believe it? Why or why not?

b. Consider a situation where you worked extremely hard but didn’t achieve the expected outcome.

• What external factors (e.g., socio-economic status, access to resources, networks) might have influenced the outcome?

• How did this experience shape your views on hard work and success?

c. List any personal or cultural phrases of encouragement that promote the idea of meritocracy.

• How do these phrases reflect a belief in hard work as the sole path to success, and why?

• In what ways might they overlook systemic barriers?

EngagingwithCriticalScholarship:Now that you’ve reflected on your personal experiences, it’s time to hear from scholars who have critically examined the myth of meritocracy. Read the following quotes, and then respond to the prompts:

Quotes to Consider:

• “The idea of meritocracy functions as a way of making sure that inequalities appear to be the result of individual differences, rather than structural ones.” - Dr. Angela Davis

• “Meritocracy is a well-disguised aristocracy that perpetuates privilege under the guise of personal achievement.” - Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

• “The myth of meritocracy erases the systemic advantages and disadvantages that people inherit and accumulate, thus justifying inequality as a matter of individual effort.” - Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Prompts for Reflection:

1. What new insights do these quotes provide about the concept of meritocracy?

• How do these perspectives challenge the idea that hard work is the sole determinant of success?

2. Reflect on your own life in the context of these quotes.

• In what ways have systemic barriers influenced your opportunities and outcomes despite your hard work?

3. Consider how these insights impact your understanding of success and failure.

• How might acknowledging these systemic factors change how you approach your goals and aspirations?

ActionableTakeaways:Understanding the limitations of meritocracy is just the beginning. Now it’s time to think about how you can apply this understanding to your own life and in support of others. Reflect on the following prompts and take action:

1. How can you shift your mindset to recognize the broader societal structures that impact success?

• What steps can you take to ensure you’re not overly harsh on yourself or others for not achieving “ success” through traditional notions of hard work?

2. Think about ways you can challenge the myth of meritocracy in your community.

• Are there conversations you can start or actions to bring awareness to the systemic barriers that affect others?

ConcludingReflection:To close out the activity, take a few minutes to summarize your thoughts and feelings. Write a reflection on what you’ve learned about meritocracy and how you plan to integrate this understanding into your life:

1. How has your perspective on meritocracy changed?

2. What next steps will you take to ensure your actions align with this new understanding?

3. How can you stay aware of how meritocracy might continue influencing your thoughts and decisions, and how will you challenge it?

Impostorism…Who’s the impostor now?

Ah, impostorism. Fantastic how this experience, this feeling, gets under our skin and demands our energy, huh? Yeah…no. Doesn’t help that many in media, research, and popular opinion continue to summon impostorism by its popular name, “impostor syndrome,” as if there's something inherently amiss within you or about you. When it comes to impostorization, you are neither medically ill nor experiencing an undiagnosable condition let’s stop over-co-opting, silencing, and misusing the language of the very real medical-related experiences of socialized others. Instead, let’s get honest about the roots of this experience that can eventually affect and limit how we move about everyday life, how we perceive ourselves and others, and how we define our next steps in the personal, academic, and professional realm.

Now, don’t get us wrong. The manifestations of impostorism can transform into mental, emotional, and spiritual misalignments that can evolve into serious health concerns (Because the mental and emotional can definitely double into physical and social difficulty). We want to acknowledge and honor the latter while also beginning to do the dismantling work needed to understand how impostorism seeps, bubbles, and blows up in us and around us for societally constructed and upheld systematic reasons.

Because we want to give credit where credit is due, it is crucial that we loudly state that the language used to explain impostorism has original ties to gender studies contexts (Go Gender Studies!) dating back to the late 1970s. Often also referred to as “Impostor Phenomenon” (I.P.), impostorism can arise as a mental pattern in which a person questions their achievements and fears being revealed as an impostor. Yet, here’s a thought, friends. What if we were to take those doubts and fears and meet them with a critical walkthrough of why they exist in the first place? If we try to include a different analytical angle amid our every-other-day college and career life crises, maybe we can come to see that impostorism is fueled by ominous, sneaky realities and deep-seated beliefs like that of the myth of meritocracy (See chapter above for our weighty opinions on this topic). Many of us tend to swirl around thought processes like, “I am inadequate because I have not achieved x, y, z...,” or, “I can’t possibly apply, interview, etc. for this because I actually don’t know anything [insert any other falsehood here].” But really, y’all, what socially and highly privileged advantageous starting lines did you have (I’m specifically talking to my racially and economically marginalized first-gen folks here)? And you’re still here. You made it, you’re here, and now, more than ever, we must create “for us, by us” ways of thinking and leading if we aim to shift mindsets. Let us push the boundaries of how we define ourselves, but more so, the collective. Doing that takes understanding and mapping how we come to certain conclusions about who we are and why we are the way we are. It takes assessing and re-constructing what we see as successful and a sign of actual mobility. This is especially crucial in academic and career spaces where we award “greatness” and ability, but what additional critique of root causes exists in awarding those standards? You have not fooled anyone of who you are; your being here is not out of sheer luck; you are not here because someone views you as a demographic number. You are here because of all the reasons you know, internally, construct who you are at your most honest self. The leading question is, how do you remind yourself of several truths when the rough gets going? To us, it takes understanding how impostorism moves, what eggs it on, and how to tackle its grasp on our mental and emotional states when all signs point to doubt, fear, and insecurity.

Don’t fully buy into what we’re telling you? Don’t just take it from us. Even our very own L.M.U. faculty, such as Dr. Angelica Gutiérrez (Pronouns: She/Her), have dedicated their research, everyday work, and vocation to proving that impostorism has its foundations in oppressive structures. In fact, Dr. Gutiérrez has pushed the boundaries of current research, and her awesome scholar-activist self coined a new term to describe our impostor-y experiences: “Impostorization.” In Dr. Gutiérrez’s 2023 co-written article “Impostorization in the ivory tower: less discussed but more vexing that impostor syndrome,” she describes impostorization as an active process that refers to the policies, practices and seemingly innocuous interactions that make (or attempt to make) individuals...question their intelligence, competence and sense of belonging in the positions or spaces that they occupy (Gutiérrez, 2023; Gutiérrez, 2021; Holmes et al., 2022 as cited in Gutiérrez & Cole, 2023).

A.K.A.: Some shady stuff is going down, and we’re conditioned to think that our perceived lacks are solely our bad. More than this, Dr. Gutiérrez and Dr. Cole, authors of “Impostorization in the ivory tower...” (2023), noted other studies that explore how folks in academia are more vulnerable to the feelings associated with impostorism (Chakraverty, 2022; Fields and Cunningham-Williams, 2021). And if academics in academia find themselves in a constant state of impostorism, what does that say about academia as the place that fuels it? What does the legacy of feeling impostorism in a space like academia translate to when out in the career world? How do we equip ourselves to critique achievement and competition cultures that “trigger feelings of insecurity and questions of selfworth” (Gutiérrez & Cole, 2023)?

According to Dr. Gutiérrez’s piece “It’s Not Impostor Syndrome but the ‘Impostorization’ of Employees That Leads to Job Dissatisfaction and Turnover,” we must investigate who is made to feel like an impostor and why. As Dr. Gutiérrez states in “It’s Not Impostor Syndrome...,”

Gender and ethnicity can make some people more susceptible to experiencing impostor feelings. This phenomenon has been primarily viewed as an individual-level issue, as suggested by the often-promoted solutions of developing confidence and reciting affirmation to counter self-doubt. However, the experience of women and professionals of color reveals that the solutions to impostor syndrome may not lie in the individual. Instead, it is in the environment and spaces they occupy (2021).

So, besties of ours, it is high time we begin to critically assess how certain behaviors, practices, policies, interactions, and expectations in academic spaces and workplaces feed into the “impostorization” of students and, eventually, the professionals you are becoming (Gutiérrez, 2021). Now, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t examine the social-emotional-mental waves you’re riding through, for there are elements to experiencing impostorization that we have to sit with and sift through, but what we are hoping you will do is identify the harmful patterns that you are being subjected to and bring them into an accountability space. Some of us may not have the emotional bandwidth to educate harm producers and harm sustainers of repeated damages, yet here is an opportunity to call on the essential nature of community. Here is where we call on community support to assist you, to guide you, to help carry this weighty accountability torch with you, for calling on folks to address the pain they have caused you, the doubt they have triggered within you, is heartbreaking work. In our love-driven perspective, we believe that having folks accompanying you while you dismantle external factors feeding your self-doubt can build communal protection and

visionary culture shifts in the long run. Beyond this, we believe that knowing how institutions could and should do better can assist us in the moments when we must call our organizations to be accountable to who we are and to the identities we walk in with.

Below, you will find a list of follow-up videos and articles that will not only assist you in keeping your organizations accountable for the harm they commit but also help you walk through how to address impostorization at its most impostor-y:

Article Resources:

• It’s Not Impostor Syndrome but the ‘Impostorization’ of Employees That Leads to Job Dissatisfaction and Turnover

• More Vexing Than the Impostor Syndrome

• Your Impostor Syndrome Might Really Be Impostorization: How to distinguish and counter them

Video Resource: Let’s Replace Cancel Culture with Accountability

Pause&GroundActivity: Thinking Through Impostorism

The battle against impostorism is lifelong. Though college may be the first time we become keenly aware of this phenomenon and its impact, it will certainly not be the last. Developing a practice of acknowledging, discussing, and redirecting feelings of impostorism within us is a healthy practice we can use at all stages of our career journey and vocation discovery. The following activities provide guidance for battling and redirecting your inner critic. Use a journal to work through each activity in sequence.

Impostorism Activity #1

Spend some time reflecting on and answering the following questions. These questions are organized according to five stages of the job search process – 1) Creating The Vision, 2) Completing The Application, 3) Prepping For The Interview, 4) Receiving The Offer, and 5) Resetting After Rejection.

TheVision:

• What are my interests?

• What do I desire from a job/career?

• Are these my desires or those of my family, friends, teachers, society, etc.?

• What do I have to lose by pursuing this path?

• What do I have to gain?

• What are my strengths/assets in relation to my career/field?

• What are other career paths I have not given myself permission to consider?

TheApplication:

• Do I meet the minimum requirements for this opportunity?

• What assets do I bring to this role?

• How can I fulfill each duty listed in the job description?

• How can I translate my list into a cover letter?

• If I have questions regarding the job description/overview, what are things I can do to get clarity?

• Do I feel clear and comfortable with the language of the job description? Can I use this language in my application/cover letter?

• Is this organization/role a good fit for me? How can I find info about the organization's values, track record, etc?

• Who can review my application/cover letter and provide sound feedback?

TheInterview:

• What are potential questions I may be asked in the interview?

• What are the assets I bring to this role?

• How can I use the job description to help me generate a list of potential questions and practice responses?

• What should I have included in my application that was relevant to this opportunity that I should consider for the interview?

• If asked to do an open-ended introduction, what can I share in 2-3 minutes about myself that provides insight into my ability to meet their needs while providing a glimpse into who I am and why I’m interested in the role?

• What questions do I have for the hiring committee to help me determine whether this opportunity is a good fit for me?

• Where can I get more information about the organization if I still have unanswered questions?

• Who do I know who can help me explore these questions and prepare for the interview?

TheOffer:

• Is the offer what I expected?

• Is it comparable to the salary range I researched?

• What do I have to lose and gain by negotiating my salary/benefits?

• Who do I know that can help me answer these questions?

• Who do I know that can help me with the negotiation process?

• Did I watch the video on salary negotiations? What tips can I implement?

TheReset:

• What did I learn from this experience?

• Was this job the right fit for my ultimate career aspirations?

• Is this the only job available in the field, or are there others?

• How can this experience help me refine my job search moving forward?

• What would I do differently if I could apply to this role again?

• Can I contact someone in my network/friends/campus for feedback and support?

• How can I practice self-care at this time?

• How will negative self-talk or self-ridicule negatively impact my efforts to recover and reset?

• What are my assumptions regarding why I was not hired? Complete a “Fear-Setting” exercise regarding these assumptions/fears (see Impostorism Activity #3).

Impostorism Activity #2

Review the videos in the video companion series and reflect upon the advice, information, and anecdotes the speakers share about the job search and career exploration process. What advice do they share that resonates with you?

Impostorism Activity #3

Complete a “Fear Setting” exercise to address your fears related to your career pursuits. “Fear Setting” is the practice of identifying and addressing fears by breaking them down into manageable parts. This process can help reduce anxiety and clarify steps for moving forward.

A.FearIdentification:

• Reflect on your current feelings about career exploration. What fears or concerns come to mind? Write down as many fears as possible without judging or filtering them.

• After listing your fears, review them and underline the one that feels most overwhelming or significant.

B.BreakdownItDown:

• For the fear you underlined, take a few minutes to break it down further. Write about why this fear feels overwhelming. What are the possible consequences if this fear comes true? How would it affect your career exploration and future plans? Be specific in describing the worst-case scenarios that come to mind. This helps in understanding the root of the fear and its potential impact.

C.ReverseIt:

• Shift your focus to prevention and coping strategies. For each worst-case scenario you wrote down, brainstorm ways to prevent it from happening. What actions can you take to reduce the likelihood of this fear becoming a reality?

• Consider how you would cope if the worst did happen. What resources, people, or internal strengths could you draw upon to manage the situation? Write down these strategies in your journal.

D. CreateaPlan:

• Reflect on your journaling and choose one fear that you feel ready to actively work on overcoming.

• Create a simple action plan with three concrete steps to address this fear in the next month. These steps involve seeking advice, gaining more information, or building skills related to your career interests.

E. Reflect:

• Conclude the exercise by reflecting on the process you just went through. How do you feel about your fears now that you've written about them and created an action plan?

• Write a few sentences encouraging yourself, reminding yourself that fear is a natural part of growth and that confronting it is a significant step toward your future career.

If you are interested in exploring “fear setting” exercises, check out the short list of additional resources below:

• Video Resource: Tim Ferriss - Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do

o Link: YouTube - Tim Ferriss: Fear-Setting

o Description: In this T.E.D. Talk, Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” introduces the concept of fear-setting, a tool he uses to manage worry and make clear decisions.

• Follow-Up Activity: Personal Fear-Setting Worksheet

o Activity: Create a personal worksheet that you can revisit when needed. Write down your fears, define the worst-case scenarios, list the steps they can take to mitigate the risks and identify the potential benefits of taking action despite fears.

o Resource: Fear-Setting Worksheet PDF (Provided by Tim Ferriss)

PART 3

Oh friends, we’ve done a lot together. We're honored to have gotten to this very page with you. It’s beyond challenging to face doubt, unearth the roots of our courage, and face the many sides of who we are and what we bring. You have given the effort and tapped into it, and if you’re here, you ’ve agreed to sit with your reasons for pushing forward to figure out the contours of your dreams. As we mentioned at the very beginning of this work, your ancestors held on long enough so that you could become. So that you can be wild for your discovery and lead that discovery with compassion and purpose. We hold so much faith in that knowledge that you’ll take this opportunity to dig so deep that you’ll invite others to come along with you. So, as we come to the close of this handbook and of this current mental-emotional journey together, it’s essential a must, really to remember that we are not just participants in the marginalizing machine around us we are the architects of new possibilities, connection engineers, and fear-defiers (even when we are scared). The myth of meritocracy, with its whispers of “just work harder,” is a tale as old as time; impostorization, with its whispers of “you’re not good enough,” is a tale as old as time; and family achievement guilt, with its whispers of “you don’t have the right to grow,” is a tale old as time. Yet, they are sneaky narratives, and they’ll slip in when we’ve lost our focus on community, deny our vulnerability, and scratch out our possibilities of meeting what we love with what the world is in need of.

This handbook is not a blueprint, but it is your digital cheerleader rooting you on as you create your many, many blueprints, not just for career success but for a larger, vivid life a life that honors the sacrifices of those who came before you, embraces the complexities of your identities, and challenges that which often seeks to minimize your worth. In this blueprint, every line, every curve, is drawn from our community’s collective wisdom, strengths, stories, emotions, creations, and triumphs.

You are more than a non-stop grind, more than the hustle, more than the constricting labels and expectations placed upon you. You are a first-gen disrupter, a professional troublemaker, and a beacon of hope we don’t mention this as a form of adding more pressure but as a reminder that you get to shape that hope Burrow in the comfort that as you forge forward, you have folks waiting for you to share who you are because the story you carve out will not just be yours alone it will double as a living reminder and example for others to utilize so that they can walk, run (a gentle jog for us…cardio is not our thing), and fly upon.

As you move forward, take the moments and musings we ’ve explored here. Embrace the power of community, the beautiful connections in your stories our stories and the radical love that fuels an evitable and unstoppable change. Your trajectory is beginning, yes, but the wisdom it carries and is being reinforced by is ages old a sweet reminder that you have a community of past and present flocking your back. So, go forth with evolving courage, with detailed intention, and with the unwavering belief that you are exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you need to do. The world is waiting for the blueprint you will leave behind. What a gift. Until next time.

With anticipation and radical love,

Your L.M.U. First-Gen Family

P.S. We got one last community gift up our digital sleeves. See below.

A

reminder.

We got a few alumni members that are here to tell you that you got them too. Here are their letters to you, the first.

We’re always first-gen, forever actually.

Alumniletters:

TotheFirst:

Congratulations! Take a moment and celebrate how far you’ve come already. You’re doing things that haven’t been done been before and that’s cause for celebration. Being the first is never easy, but you should feel nothing but pride of taking that first step forward for yourself, your family, and your future. I know you might feel that you still have so much left to do, and you will get there. For now, it’s so important to stay in this moment and know that everything will happen for you exactly as it’s supposed to.

I was the first in so many ways. I was the first in my family to be born in the U.S.A., the first to graduate from college, the first to study abroad and continue to explore the world, and the first to start my own business. I will continue to be the first as I’m breaking barriers and boundaries that my parents and extended family could only dream of.

As the eldest daughter, I was always meant to just figure it out and always be ready to help my family. I was always told I had two options for my life – become a doctor or a lawyer. Well, I don’t like blood, so the answer seemed to be that I had to choose Law. I was going down that path which is why I chose my Business Law emphasis. I worked at a law firm for two years during my time at LMU and kept telling myself that’s what I should do. I finally had a moment during my time studying abroad in Germany where I realized that’s not at all what I wanted. I decided to add in my Management emphasis and pursue my first role in Human Resources instead.

What a disappointment I was! My family couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t continue to pursue Law and they made sure I knew it. How else was I ever going to be successful? Well, I’m proud to say that after a lot of hard work, overcoming feelings of imposter syndrome, and knowing that I belonged in all the rooms I was in, I had a very successful 15-year career in Human Resources. That is until I realized that I was meant for more and decided to pursue my own business. Again, you can imagine what my family had to say! They had just begun to understand that my choice to pursue HR was a good one, and here I was “throwing it away” in their eyes.

That’s the thing about being First Gen. We’re going to continue to do things that our parents and family may not understand, and that can be a great thing! You are expanding the possibilities for yourself and your family by being brave enough to pursue uncharted territories. I’m doing that again now as I write this and pursue my Coaching and Training business. I know I’ve created my own path successfully and will continue to do it again because I’m proud to be the First.

As First Gen, we all hold a lot of beliefs that tend to hold us back in our careers and lives. The trick is to be aware of them, overcome them, and write your own story. Beliefs that hold us back can look like:

• Be grateful for every opportunity no matter what

• You’re only successful if you’re a doctor or lawyer

• Pursuing your passion is a privilege; you need to go after the realistic jobs

• I’m not meant to be in these rooms if I’m the only one that looks like me

Let’s rewrite these beliefs! You absolutely belong in every room you find yourself in and even the ones you don’t. You get to create your own definition of success. Being grateful is a great thing, but don’t forget to also advocate for yourself and get what you deserve. You can pursue your passion AND get paid, and I hope to be just one of the many examples out there.

So again, I remind you to not forget to celebrate! We may always feel like we’re not doing enough, but you are more than enough. You are creating a whole new world and always remember to stand proud. You’re a Lion after all!

I can’t wait to see where your journey takes you. There are so many of us out here, and you are in great company. Don’t forget to reach out and ask for help whenever you need it. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.

Wishing you all the success, however you define it!

Lindsay Benitez, Class of 2010 Pronouns: (she/her/ella)

Major(s): B.A. Business Administration – Management and Business Law

Founder / CEO of Lindsay B Coaching, LLC

Contact information:

•Instagram: @lindsaybcoaching

•Linkedin.com/in/lindsaybenitez

•www.lindsaybenitez.com

•coach@lindsaybenitez.com

TotheFirst:

It wasn’t until I began my college career that I began to think “I’ve worked my whole life to get to this moment [getting to college]...now what?”

This idea of “now what?” stayed with me all throughout college. I remember being a first-year thinking I had everything figured out and that college was going to be a breeze. That was not the case. Don’t get me wrong, I loved and enjoyed every moment of my college experience, it just had lots of unexpected shifts and pivots.

I made the decision early in my LMU career that I wanted to work in education, more specifically as a Spanish teacher. I fell in love with the language in high school, and I knew I wanted to study it further. I was following all the right steps. I was able to observe Spanish classrooms at Da Vinci Science High School in El Segundo and was able to learn directly from teachers in the field. I was getting a firsthand experience of what being a teacher was like. I knew I was in the right space.

When you’re thinking about whether a career is right for you, the most important thing to consider is how you are connecting to the work. For me, I’ve learned to trust my gut, even when I want to ignore it. When applying to colleges, I had a vision of what my dream school would be. I was so excited. This changed the first time I visited my dream school’s campus. I walked out of my car and immediately felt nothing. I was upset. I wanted to have that gut feeling. I didn’t want to believe it, then I visited LMU for the first time. Driving onto campus for the first time as a prospective student, I felt that gut feeling, and it led me to one of the most amazing and influential places I’ve ever experienced–LMU.

As graduation day was soon approaching, I had made the decision to continue my studies at LMU in a 4 + 1 Masters program in Education. I went into graduation season thinking I was only going to focus on my degree (second degree). Then life throws new opportunities your way.

To the First:

For many years, I have envisioned myself working at my alma mater high school. Throughout college, I developed a passion for social justice, education, and service. I knew the place I needed to be at in order to grow professionally in a way that would influence my teaching. Well, as luck would have it, not a single Spanish teaching position was open.

I was fully prepared to simply focus on my masters and try the job search again in a year. Then, another curveball came my way when I was recommended to apply for a Service & Justice Program Coordinator position at my high school. This wasn’t a teaching gig, but it was a foot in the door. I had a moment where I really had to look at my options and consider whether I should go ahead and apply to the one place I had envisioned myself being at or try to stick to the script and apply for a Spanish teaching position at another school in a year. I chose the Program Coordinator position. I learned that career curveballs can lead you down a path that will advance your career in a way that sticking to a script may or may not do.

Now, I was not only the young guy at work, I was colleagues with all my old teachers. There came the imposter syndrome again. I thought everyone would look at me and question my ability to work based on the simple fact that I roamed those halls only a few years prior. But this

was not the case. I was welcomed in a way that I had never experienced before. I felt a sense of belonging right away, which was very different from my time as a high school student. All of this to say, the “now what?” is an often scary question to consider, but I think it should be a welcomed one. Embrace the curveballs and believe in your gut. Though I may not know all of you, please know that we are all rooting for you. Please feel free to contact me!

Emil Sol, Class of 2022 and 2023 Pronouns: (He/Him/His)

Major(s): LMU B.A. Spanish, 2022 –LMU M.A. Educational Studies, 2023

Current Employment: Program Coordinator, Loyola High School of Los Angeles: Center for Service and Justice

Contact Information: emiladansol@gmail.com

TotheFirst:

You know all the pressures that come with being the first in anything - the weight of others’ expectations, the self-assumed responsibility to maintain a lead in everything you do in life, and the pressure to find success only through traditional and safe paths. These experiences are widely known and felt among our community. What I have found to be the most difficult thing of this journey, and what I encourage you tochallenge in your own journey, is whatever you have adopted as your default setting and with that, question every “should” statement in your life.

For many their default is so automatic that it is nearly impossible to define. The default mode for me was to perform well in school, graduate, commit to a career path, and achieve stability. There is nothing inherently bad with creating goals and identifying the basic steps to achieve them. But I found myself letting the pressures stunt me to the point that I only wanted to check off boxes for the satisfaction of completion. I did not know when or why I chose to commit to that linear path and why I had so adamantly adhered only to that quick line of progression. Post graduation, I quickly faced the fear that maybe I did not want this career path but that I had no choice because I had never considered anything else. I had no choice because my family was already so proud of what I had yet to achieve. I had no choice because I should have thought of that sooner.

Oh, the dangers of the “should” statements. I recently learned that when you use the word should, you are condemning the choice you made at any specific moment because of the information you now have in this moment. You are holding yourself to an impossible standard while simultaneously shaming yourself for not having known better. “I should have spent more time studying and I would have performed better.” “I should have driven slower down that road so I wouldn’t get pulled over.” “I should have said hello yesterday, because now they think I don't like them!” The “shoulds” are never ending and unforgiving. There is always something you could have done instead. “I should have thought of that sooner because now I am stuck.”

Give yourself the grace to be human. Allow yourself to live in the moment and understand that you did well with what you had. Your default setting can always change. You are not stuck and it is okay to question your path, at any point. Your needs change, the pressures you feel now can subside, and new pressures can grow. It is okay that you did not do what you believe you should have done. You have a choice and though you may proudly carry the title of being “first” to achieve many milestones, you are not the first to experience these worries.

There is no right way to achieve your goals and no wrong time to change them either. I invite you to challenge your motives, goals, and choices. Are they serving you? Are they considerate of other circumstances in your life? Are you allowing yourself to admit faults and shortcomings? Are you accepting of change? For many, these questions don’t come up until you are left to your own devices to create and follow your own path. Don’t ignore them; lean into them. Become the first to stray from the default and welcome the change.

Ivonne Franco, Class of 2021

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

Major(s)/Minor(s): B.A. in Psychology and Political Science and Women Gender Studies Double Minor

Current Employment: Director of Operations at Spertus, Landes & Josephs, LLP

Contact information: francoivonne@live.com

TotheFirst:

Remember that feeling of walking onto campus for the first time? The excitement, the nervousness, the overwhelming sense of "Will I belong here?" As a first-generation transfer college graduate myself, I can tell you – that feeling never truly goes away. Once a Lion, always a Lion. We carry the spirit of this place with us, no matter where our journeys take us. For me, it manifested as imposter syndrome. Even with academic achievements and professional milestones under my belt, that voice in my head whispered, "You're not good enough." It's a constant battle, but one we can learn to manage.

The turning point for me was seeking guidance from people I admired. Professors, supervisors, and mentors in my field – their advice, along with therapy and a strong support network of friends and family, became my lifeline. Don't be afraid to reach out! Remember, all you need is one person to believe in you and your long-term goals, beginning with yourself.

This network also fueled my drive. Their support allowed me to work "smarter, not harder." Instead of drowning in self-doubt, I focused on learning and growth. My resources were simple and the backbone of my achievements: connecting with people at events, applying to jobs aligned with my long-term goals, and staying open to new opportunities. Don't limit yourself, Lions! We have endless potential and possibilities; the journey is ours to define.

● Connecting with people at events: LMU offers a wealth of resources to help you excel in your career journey. Attend workshops on financial literacy, professional development, negotiation strategies, and technical skills relevant to your field. These events not only provide valuable knowledge but also allow you to network with professionals and fellow students.

● Applying to jobs aligned with your long-term goals: Don't wait for graduation to start your job search. Look for internships or part-time positions that align with your career aspirations. This will give you valuable real-world experience and help you build your resume and curriculum vitae.

● Staying open to new opportunities: Explore different paths within your field. Attend career fairs and informational sessions to learn about various industries and companies. You might discover an exciting opportunity you never knew existed.

By actively engaging with these resources, you'll gain the knowledge, skills, and connections necessary to thrive in the professional world. Imposter syndrome doesn't vanish the minute you enter the workforce. But the skills I honed to navigate it at LMU proved invaluable. Balancing work with activities that brought me joy – spending time with loved ones, enjoying outdoor activities, even solo dates – became my coping mechanism. It allowed me to quiet the inner critic and focus on the present. Remember, the pain we endure is temporary, and the joy of achieving our goals is sweeter because of it.

The experience of overcoming imposter syndrome in an academic setting gave me the confidence to navigate similar challenges in a professional setting. I sought out a team where I

could learn and grow. My passion for research led me to work in the public and private sectors. My current employer, the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business (USC), helped crystallize my first professional goal – to use my research to empower communities like ours.

As a first-generation student, I always knew I wanted to focus on research studies about authenticity within culture, societal power hierarchies, and intersectional identities. Now, I have the opportunity to pilot a mentorship program at USC and hopefully expand it to other universities. This, for me, is my example of paying it forward – using my first-generation experience to pave the way for others.

Lions, remember this – we belong here. In our classrooms, in our careers, and this community. The journey won't be easy, but by supporting each other and utilizing the resources available, we can achieve anything we set our minds to. Let's continue to learn, grow, and inspire each other. We are all here for the same reason – to make ourselves and our communities proud.

With Lion Pride,

Sharon Azucena Nat, Class of 2019 Pronouns: She/her

Major(s)/Minor(s): Psychology with a minor in Women’s & Gender Studies

Current employer and position: USC Marshall School of Business, Lab Manager and Research Coordinator with the Culture, Diversity, and Psychophysiology Lab

Contact Information:

• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sharonnat

• Instagram: @thesharonnat

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“Ourancestorsheldlongenoughsothatwe couldbecome.”-Unknown

“Weourdescendants’wildestdream.” -Dr. Ruha Benjamin

A First To Go Production

Illustrated by Leyna Tran,

‘26

Edited by Ariel Nelson, ’23, ‘25

Support from Loyola Marymount University’s Academic Resource Center & Office of Career and Professional Development