First Day of School

The first words a professor said to me in college, “I bet you all think you’re real smart, don’t you?” with a blatantly wry smile on his aged face. I was seventeen years old. Hopeful, idealistic, motivated. I was no stranger to the “big fish in a small pond becoming a small fish in a big sea” metaphor that counselors and teachers had warned the transition from high school to college would be like, but still was unwilling to take any heed of it. I was at the top of my class, teachers’ pet (plural), and had just gotten accepted to a top university.   

“I’m a 4 point plus student! College will be a breeze!”

This was my mindset. Ha! It’s almost comical now how naïve I was coming into college. Perhaps had I considered that I would be attending one of the top private engineering schools in the country, would be miles away from home and family, and ultimately would be competing with some of the most intelligent people I have ever come in contact with I would’ve taken myself off that high horse a bit.

Like most incoming freshmen, I lacked a certain grounding in reality. More specifically, I lacked a grounding in the reality of my own situation. I came from a single parent, below poverty line household. I went to a Title 1 Public School with under preforming standardized test scores. I was the only one out of over seven hundred in my graduating class to make it to the university that I did.

Now, I want to be clear. I had some AMAZING teachers in high school. Amazing. However, despite how good I thought my education had been, after the first few weeks of my first semester in University I found that I was grossly underprepared. And not just academically. I don’t know about you, but my family didn’t exactly have fifty grand lying around to cover that first year’s tuition. In fact, I’d be surprised if our family bank account had even a positive balance the day I left for school. But that’s all normal right?

Wrong.

“Yea, my dad was able to pay in full all four years of my tuition.”

Throat tightens. I’m sorry, what?!

“Oh, you come from a struggling household.”

Struggling? When had we ever struggled? Not once to my memory. I had a happy childhood. Feeling the dryers at the Laundromat to score the ones that were already hot. But everyone has memories like that?

I was an underdog, and came into the game on an uneven playing field. With the growing attention to the economic disparity in the United States in the news recently I was curious about others’ stories. Are these families like mine that are struggling? Just how lucky was I to make it out of the blackhole that is the public school system? When we start referring to the solutions to these problems as “Waiting for Superman” or winning “the Lottery” something ‘s not right. Going through almost four years of college being at this disadvantage can be a hollowing and exhausting experience, but watching documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” and seeing the benefits of programs like Teach for America, I think maybe we’re not as alone as we thought.