As I was wrapping up my final semester at Michigan, I thought a lot about my identity and how who I am has shaped my years here. My identity is composed of several aspects: a woman, Asian American, and business student. But, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a first generation college student and specifically what that means on a campus full of people who aren't.

All of my other works have been reflecting about myself, so I wanted to take a less self-centered approach for my capstone project. I decided to take on this idea about being a first generation college student on this campus, a topic that is still personal to me being that I am the first person to go to college myself, but I wanted to explore it as a larger issue on campus. There's been much written about from the first gen perspective, but I wanted to see it from the continuing gen perspective as well, so I compared the college experiences of both groups. I conducted a series of interviews with students from freshmen to seniors to learn about what people thought about how this identity affected them. This led to a website hosting all of these interviews as well as telling my own story. The goal of the project is to show how truly different (or similiar) first gen and continuing gen expereinces are, and what additional support students need.

Many of the questions made my peers think about their present, past, and future. The questions made me think about my time in college too as I'm about to head into the next phase of my life. There are so many more questions to be asked, but I hope this is a start to generate conversation about diversity on the University of Michigan campus.