Lexie ’s Comments (group member since Dec 13, 2013)

Lexie ’s comments from the LMU First To Go Community group.

I'm pretty sure that didn't answer your question, LT! But, the latter is something I've thought about often. I'd like to add that I'm not trying to put down my high school, but I think that it's a common misconception (mostly held by parents) that if you go to this school, you'll go to college. Not true. Most of us had to fight with the fact of being first gen, and many of us were frustrated by it. Yes, I am extremely proud of it now, but I know that at the time, I didn't understand why I didn't know about the thousands upon thousands of resources that could have facilitated my transition. Although I received a kind of education that raw-ly prepared me for all nighters, time-management skills, and discipline, I still expected more. But, as we all know, "more" is in the hands of officials that have forgotten the significance of "more". It's an uphill battle.

I grew up in a city where middle schools and high schools had nicknames associated to them. Not the kind of associations one shames at age 12, but the ones you think about when you’re much older. For example, one of the high schools around my area, Leuzinger High School, was referred to as “Lose-a-finger”—primarily because there were rumors that a student actually did get his finger chopped off. But do you get what I’m trying to get at? Children, who are barley grasping the concept, idea, dream of higher education, are bred to believe that the only chance they have at a future is a place where your finger might get cut off (Don’t get me wrong, Leu House is a great school with amazing students, but like everywhere else in the world, bad experiences follow.) . What it comes down to is this: I went to a high school where “college prep” was the order. We had to take four years of science, math, English, etc. to make us “competitive” students. We were a “Blue Ribbon” school—as if that made a difference. But, at the end of the day, we had no SAT prep, ACT prep, etc., we got the smallest library built for us by the time I was a junior, and many of my own peers aren’t even at four year universities. We had little to no resources. My school might have had a nice tree in front of the administrative office and a couple flowers in the garden, but it was Leuzinger graduates that went to UCLA, USC, and got Gates Millenium Scholarships. Not us. There is Hope in the Unseen, you just got to defy the unseen part of it all.