{"id":26197,"date":"2021-02-11T12:44:06","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T17:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=26197"},"modified":"2021-02-11T12:44:06","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T17:44:06","slug":"newbury-center-to-create-community-for-first-gen-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2021\/02\/11\/newbury-center-to-create-community-for-first-gen-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Newbury Center to Create Community for First-Gen Students"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/983516512&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\" title=\"wtbu\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wtbu<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\/newbury-center-to-create-community-for-first-gen-students\" title=\"Newbury Center to Create Community for First-Gen Students\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Newbury Center to Create Community for First-Gen Students<\/a><\/div>\n<p>By Angela Yang<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maria Erb was swept to the U.S. as an infant from South Korea, and grew up with her Dutch family on a dairy farm in Vermont.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Her parents never cared much for education, and if not for her own drive to apply to college, she might have spent her life as a dairy farmer, like many of her relatives. But she knew that wasn\u2019t the life for her.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI just believed that there was something more for me out there,\u201d Erb said. \u201cI understood that in order to make a change or get out of my life on the farm, by going to college, that would open doors for me. And it truly, truly did.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After initially graduating from the University of New Hampshire then going on to get her master\u2019s degree from the University of Vermont, she has grown passionate about helping other first-generation students access higher education.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the founding director of Boston University\u2019s Newbury Center, a support hub for first-gen students, Erb said she is eager to get started. She remembers applying to college herself: she only tried for \u00a0 one school, and to her surprise, she was admitted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Erb, who graduated second in her high school class, said she later discovered that year\u2019s applicant pool was highly competitive. She didn\u2019t understand much of that at the time, but what she did know was that she didn\u2019t have the luxury of shooting for every basket:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cYou hear now so many students applying for so many colleges, but it was also costly,\u201d Erb said. \u201cI couldn&#8217;t afford to do that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That low-income family background followed her throughout her college years. And those challenges weren\u2019t unique to her \u2014 they can be typical for many first-gen college students.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe look back on that, and it&#8217;s like of course that made sense, as first-gen students, that we weren&#8217;t able to participate in study abroad or we didn&#8217;t do unpaid internships because we couldn&#8217;t afford to,\u201d she said. \u201cOur main thing was having to work several jobs \u2026 so that we could afford to just live day to day.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Erb aims for the Newbury Center to establish a sense of community among first-gen students across campus in hopes that those who share experiences like hers can realize they are not alone, and that they have a support system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For BU senior Anna Pham, that sort of community is exactly what she needed as a first-gen student. She said she\u2019s never felt fully able to share her college experience with her parents, because they had never experienced that lifestyle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBU is a very big school with so many resources, but I think something that isn&#8217;t really talked about too much is the first-gen experience,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I felt like during my time here, I kind of hid that side of me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pham was born in California to immigrant parents from Vietnam. She said she feels lucky to have grown up in a \u201cvery loving\u201d family, but that when college application season rolled around, she had to search for support elsewhere to navigate the process.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Her parents primarily spoke Vietnamese, while she primarily spoke English. Pham said the language barrier made it difficult for her parents to help her fill out documents or proofread her essays.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though she couldn\u2019t always ask for college-related support from her parents, Pham did learn to seek mentorship in her peers and instructors. She recommends finding a faculty member who was also a first-gen student, or making use of school resources like the Center for Career Development at BU.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Erb also recognizes this need for mentorship among students who didn\u2019t come from a household that has gone through the higher-education system. These students are less likely to have family connections to industry professionals who might be willing to offer extra work experience or career guidance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She said she hopes to help students start building that sort of network through the Newbury Center. Along with that, Erb plans to offer leadership opportunities and host workshops that further career development skills.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHow do we prepare first-gen students the best to move forward? How do you negotiate a salary and your benefits if you get a job offer?\u201d Erb said. \u201cPeople don&#8217;t necessarily teach that to you. But how can we provide some of those skills to students so they&#8217;re better prepared when they&#8217;re faced with that situation?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This year, Pham will move on from BU to face those kinds of challenges. She said if she were to leave advice for other first-gen college students, she would tell them to take advantage of their school\u2019s resources \u2014 and to be unapologetic about the background they come from.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBeing a first-gen student, I think that just gives you a more creative edge to who you are,\u201d Pham said. \u201cAnd I think that&#8217;s something that shouldn&#8217;t be hidden.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>wtbu \u00b7 Newbury Center to Create Community for First-Gen Students By Angela Yang &nbsp; Maria Erb was swept to the U.S. as an infant from South Korea, and grew up with her Dutch family on a dairy farm in Vermont. Her parents never cared much for education, and if not for her own drive to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1597,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26198,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26197\/revisions\/26198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}