Jun 7
Red Light, Red Line
I have something to share today. But first, by way of preface: This is a time of year that I often think about my students and wonder how they’re faring in the world outside the Gothic Wonderland. One of the pieces of advice I often give new advisors is, “Don’t forget about your students in the summertime,” because so much that is impactful happens then. I think this is especially true for first-generation and low-income students, since navigating co-curricular decisions and making ends meet can be such a challenge when they’re away from campus. I tell this story now because I’m still thinking about and making sense of it, all these years later, and because I hope it gives you a window onto a topic we also discuss a lot when it comes to 1GLI students: why it can be so hard for them to ask for help.
“Thank you for calling Barwood Taxi, what’s the address you’re calling from?” In the summer of 1994, I worked at a call center for the Barwood Taxi Company of Rockville, MD. In those days, before GPS or cell phones, my job was to take the customer’s information and convey it to the dispatcher, who would then assign a driver. There was a clock on the wall, the simple analog type we had all through my school days, and a red light over it would go on whenever anyone was on hold. I still have a somatic memory of what that red light felt like in my body, the urgency and exhaustion. It meant I had to drive myself harder, do more, until I saw the light go off. Then I would take a breath and wait for it to start all over again.
Sometimes college felt like that, too. As a first-generation, low-income student, it didn’t take long to find out that getting into an elite school and finding a way to pay for it — as improbable as it had seemed for someone like me — was only the first step. Once there, I found myself on an academic treadmill in which my pages-to-read deficit would sometimes reach four figures. I loved that stuff, though: reading, writing, and discussing ideas was my groove, and I knew how to excel at it. My early impostor syndrome eroded as I realized that, at least in the classroom, I could hold my own. The hard part was what happened outside the classroom.
In the spring of my sophomore year, my Peace Studies class went to El Salvador without me. It wasn’t an official trip, just a group of students who decided it would be educational to go there over spring break and volunteer as election observers. The country’s rebel army had just signed a peace agreement with the government, and well-meaning college students, mainly white and upper-middle-class, were flocking to the capital to keep an eye out for fraud, violence, or intimidation, and to teach the Salvadorans what we thought we already knew: how to do democracy. (Oh, the irony…)
I couldn’t go because the airfare was too much, and at one level, that wasn’t different from the reality I was already familiar with: that some of my classmates would travel on expensive vacations over break and return to campus with ski lift passes dangling from their down coats. I knew I couldn’t have that, but I didn’t want it. I loved spending my breaks riding the Amtrak train to visit friends at other colleges, getting to experience new people and places. It was harder to watch an academic opportunity pass me by because I couldn’t afford it.
So that summer, I made a plan. Instead of returning to Oklahoma City to work at the factory, as I’d done the last two years, I decided I would find a way to pursue that college rite of passage, the unpaid internship. In my school’s Career Center, I found a listing for an unpaid internship with a non-profit in D.C. working directly with new immigrants and advocating for better immigration policy. As an intern, my main role would be to teach ESL classes in the evenings, which seemed perfect, since it would allow me to work a paid job during the day to cover my living expenses. I would still need to take out an extra loan to cover the summer earnings requirement for my financial aid package, but I figured the experience would be worth it, since it might open up future opportunities in the non-profit field.
By this time in my life, I had worked a series of low-wage jobs, most of which I either found or advertised for in the local newspaper or through a temp agency. I started there — but finding someone willing to hire me for only two months proved more challenging than I’d expected. Eventually, my search led me to Barwood Taxi. I found a roommate in Gaithersburg, at the far end of the D.C. Metro’s red line, and started commuting by day to Rockville and by night to DuPont Circle, where my internship was based. Flat broke until I got my first paycheck, I soon realized that I couldn’t afford so many trips on the Metro. So I decided to ration my funds by biking to work, using a friend’s little sister’s old bike. Barwood Taxi was a 20 mile round-trip from my apartment in Gaithersburg, which I convinced myself I was perfectly capable of doing while working two jobs — after all, I was young, healthy, and determined. I failed to consider that I would be starting from a state of complete unfitness achieved by a college student diet of cheese steaks and pizza. My exercise regimen up to that point had consisted of walking to and from class, the post office, and the dining hall on my tiny liberal-arts campus.
The first day I rode that bike to work, I had to stop and walk a bunch of times, prolonging the journey to two hours each way. I got better gradually by mapping out the route and setting goals for how far I needed to ride before I allowed myself to get off and walk. Eventually, I could make it all the way from Gaithersburg to Rockville with only one walk, at the Father Stanislaus Cuddy Memorial Bridge on 355, a steep bastard that thwarted my skinny legs and strong will all summer long. While waiting for a paycheck, I used my last remaining cash to buy day-old baguettes and oily yellow cheese from the grocery store. Although I’d grown up working-class, I never experienced real hunger until that summer. I remember thinking about food all the time, sometimes rewarding myself for a successful bike trip with a pair of cinnamon raisin biscuits from Hardee’s, which would then leave me short for lunch.
It didn’t occur to me to ask for help. I had tunnel vision, I was solving one problem at a time, and at no point did I stop to consider that my college friends — or anyone at the institution itself — might be willing or able to help. I did confide in my sister, though, and in my best friend from high school, who was nannying that summer for a family in New Jersey I’d introduced her to. Both sent me boxes of food, including canned yams and collard greens, which surely cost more to send than it would have been to buy them from the grocery store. My co-workers at the call center fed me peanut butter crackers, which I gratefully accepted. Eventually, after I cashed my first paycheck, I was able to buy my own food, at which point I developed a durable obsession with Chips Ahoy! cookies and frozen pizzas, both excellent sources of cheap calories for a person who’d never learned to cook and had no access to an equipped kitchen.
The hunger and the long commute both took a toll on me physically — I was always tired, and I knew I wasn’t doing my best for the immigrants who came to learn from me at the non-profit. One night I nodded off while my students were doing small group work. Another time, I got caught slipping sideways through the Metro turnstiles to avoid the fare and was issued a warning. I realized what I was doing was unsustainable, and I had to make the difficult decision to quit my internship. I had lasted all of two weeks.
When I got back to college in the fall, I faced the inevitable question: How’d you spend the summer? If I didn’t know the person well, I lied. I told them about the internship and pretended that was all. But I told my friends the truth, and their reaction caught me off guard: they were furious with me. They couldn’t fathom why I would have allowed that kind of hardship to happen without asking for help. For my part, I couldn’t understand their attitude — I had grown up in a world where a certain level of hardship was normal, and I did a lot of things on my own. This mutual lack of understanding drove a wedge between us, one that persisted into my senior year.
As a self-reflective person and an anthropologist by training, I usually pride myself on being able to recognize some of the learned and inherited ways of thinking that have influenced my actions over the years. But for a long time, this episode remained opaque to me. I rarely spoke about it, convinced that, in my current context, my failure to employ “help-seeking behaviors” reflected poorly on me. After all, learning how to ask for help is one of the key skills we try to teach our students, and it’s also sometimes viewed as a mark of maturity.
But I recently read a piece that reframed this experience for me, along with the assumptions I’d made about it over the years. The article, “The Complexity of Cultural Mismatch in Higher Education,” by Janet Chang and Shu-Wen Wang et al. (2020), posits that:
“Prevailing explanations of the social-class achievement gap tend to focus on resource deficiency (i.e., the lack of financial or academic resources) or individual factors (e.g., skills) and overlook the importance of a cultural mismatch between norms of independence ingrained in American higher education and interdependent norms that characterize working-class contexts.” (281)
Chang, Wang et al. did in-depth interviews with 1G students, and what they found was that these students failed to ask for help not because they lacked knowledge or skill, but because they had grown up in a context in which self-reliance and resilience were prized, and “burdening others” with one’s problems could be viewed as a selfish act. Counterintuitively, the authors link this emphasis on independent action to a value system based on interdependence, in which relational factors play an important role in whom 1G students are inclined to reach out to when they’re struggling. This is particularly the case, they found, for students of color:
“The breadth, depth, and salience of relational concerns were particularly pronounced for FGCS [first-generation college students] from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ethnic minority FGCS tended to experience additional concerns that disclosure of problems would jeopardize their relationships with others … For example, their concerns related to maintaining group harmony or avoiding conflict.” (288)
When they do ask for help, 1G students are, they write, likely to engage in an “effortful cognitive process to select the support source for which they anticipated the greatest level of helpfulness with the lowest relational costs,” a process they describe as “filtering” (291). This often means not involving parents, who are seen as already bearing the burden of financial assistance, while instead seeking out others who share their background and presumably can understand. In my case, accepting help from peers like my co-workers, sister, or high-school friend (who came from a similar class background) was acceptable, but reaching out to my better-off college friends — or anyone at the college itself — was something I couldn’t imagine doing. Ironically, by not doing so, I ended up damaging my relationships more than if I had simply let them know what was happening in the first place.
Learning about this research has helped me come to terms with that difficult summer and forgive myself. It’s simply in my nature as a person that, when I see a red light that indicates I’m not meeting my own very high expectations, I dig in and work harder. Over the years, I’ve learned to better manage the impulse to go it alone and recognize when the challenge at hand requires leaning more on others. But I’ve also learned that my occasional reluctance to ask for help is not just something to be ashamed of, but to be understood as part of the whole of who I am, and have been, as someone who has spent most of her adult life straddling class-based experiences and values.
What does that mean for the way we talk to our students about help-seeking? Chang, Wang et al. suggest that we “reframe the cultural norms of higher education to be more inclusive of interdependent norms and to value diverse social class experiences” (291). Moreover, they encourage us to “reframe the mobilization of support and connection with others as being part of the self-exploration and self-expression journey” of a four-year college education. Doing so allows us not to privilege one way of being over the other, but to recognize the strengths and limitations of each.
Now, when I watch my 1GLI students metaphorically charge the hills, I can appreciate that they have their reasons, and continue seeking to build the kind of relationship that would enable them to feel safe in “burdening” me with their concerns and struggles. I can also recognize that all of our students can benefit from embracing some of the values of self-reliance and resilience these students bring with them to college. There is no hard line between independence and interdependence; instead, it is a spectrum we can all engage at challenging moments in our lives, learning from each other along the way.
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