Corey Smith and Neha Chisty
"Honestly, I hated it my first semester." At StoryCorps, Neha Chisty and Corey Smith talk about the challenges of being first generation students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they discuss the assistance both of them received through the Regents' Ambassador Program at Texas A&M.
- [Neha] I'm a first-generation college student and it was difficult trying to convince my parents to let me come to Texas A&M University. So I am of Muslim faith, so a lot of the females stay at home. My parents say, oh no, she wants to leave the house. And it wasn't just my parents, it was my cousins, and my uncles are all like, no you're not allowed to leave. But something struck me my senior year. Let me make a change, let me make a difference, be the first one to leave my house to go to university.
- [Corey] I'm also a first-generation college student, so when it came to the application process and trying to get to college, it was a foreign concept. I didn't really have anyone in the family who knew how to help me or who wanted to help me figure that out, so I just figured it out on my own. Coming to Texas A&M was a battle in itself. I actually graduated high school while living with my mom and sister in a motel. I didn't really get to move out of that thing until I got to Texas A&M, when I got into my dorm.
- [Neha] Tell me some of the best memories you had, because you are a fifth year graduate student.
- [Corey] I've been a part of a couple of programs. One of them was the program that I came to when I was admitted to A&M. It's called the Regents' Ambassador Program for first-generation socioeconomically challenged college students and with that I really found home at A&M. I got to see more people like me and feel more comfortable at A&M. I am a minority and I didn't have as many people telling me how to study, what to do when you get sick, all those kinds of things. So I was able to learn from my peers in a very effective way, in a very quick way. I became a mentor my second year. It's probably my greatest accomplishment as a college student. So what about you? What are some of things that you've seen while you've been here at A&M?
- [Neha] I'm currently a senior. My favorite memory was being a part of Regents' Ambassadors Program. It just helped me really build that second home at Texas A&M University, because honestly I hated it my first semester. I was away from family, I didn't know anybody, I was stuck in my room, and through that program I realized that this is something I wanted to carry on. People don't realize the stress that first-generation college students have, what they have to go through. We have all this burden on wanting to do better, because we're low income students. We don't want to go through what our parents went through and we want to build a better future for not only ourselves, but our kids in the future. And we want to be those role models for our sisters and our brothers and our cousins and everything. Being that family that had to live paycheck to paycheck, I experienced a lot of family financial issues. I'm in school, but I have to worry about what's going on back home, although I'm a full-time student, I've always worked since freshman year, just because it's really difficult for my parents to do their day-to-day life without someone else helping them. The saddest parts about being here is not being able to fully commit to the Texas A&M experience, because anything can happen and I have to drop everything and go back home.
- [Corey] I definitely can attest that difficulty. This past fall, I was making frequent trips back home, because my younger sister, she was pregnant. So I was trying to help her financially, even though I couldn't really sustain my own self financially. I work part-time while I'm studying here, but I ended up helping my sister out a little bit, helping out with rent. Made my fall semester last year pretty intense. When it's something that happens to first-generation college students, it's typically either a financial issue, health issue, and in recent cases, deportation issues. I have a friend who's actually here, she's also undocumented, but she's working towards getting her papers, because she was allowed a pathway and she was actually detained by ICE for an entire week or two. These are just some of the issues that some of us first-generation college students, minority students have to go through.
- [Neha] You have to find your own community here. Being a predominantly white institution, a lot of us don't fit in already due to our skin colors and especially our backgrounds. When the Muslim was going on, people here told me that they've had people come up to them and call them terrorists and tell them we don't belong here and then they wanted to say, Aggies we're united, Aggies care. And it didn't seem like we're all united as one. I'm really into bringing diversity within Texas A&M so it's been really cool to see what freshman, what their mindset is coming into Texas A&M and helping them realize that they have a home here.