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Recently I received an email that brought me to tears. An alumna let me know she was returning to school to earn a doctoral degree after years of working in the mental health-care field. While we kept up through email for a few years after her graduation, we lost touch when her first child was born. Through email she shared with me that as she contemplated her return to academia and to her goal to become a professor like me, she found herself wondering where she might have ended up had I not been her undergraduate mentor. While my official role was her Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program research project adviser, we had bonded over our shared experience of being first-generation, or “first-gen,” college students. I think she valued that part of our relationship more than all the edits I made to her research paper!

Back then, 51���� didn’t have an official mentoring program for first-gen students. My own college experience was considerably enhanced by a professor who was willing to mentor me and help me overcome the barriers my first-gen status had on my access to knowledge and opportunities. So, when OHIO officially began pairing first-year, first-gen Bobcats with campus faculty and staff through the Ohio First Scholars program, I welcomed the chance to join.

Interestingly, my most recent mentee connected with me not in my role as her mentor, but in my role as director of our doctoral program in clinical psychology. She was an incoming first-year student who hadn’t even been to orientation, yet she was already seeking advice about how to earn doctoral degrees in psychology! I answered her brief email with a barrage of information, revealed our shared status as first-gen students, and invited her not only to have coffee with me during her campus orientation visit, but offered to personally connect her to Ohio First Scholars program Director Angela Lash. As a result, the program paired us up and we have developed a strong relationship that will continue beyond the official “first year” of the program.

I receive as much as I give in my first-generation mentorship relationships. I am far removed from my own college years, and the world has changed tremendously. Still, many basic barriers remain for those without generational connections to the academic culture.  It is helpful for me to hear from my mentees how those barriers manifest in today’s culture, so that I don’t forget to think about them with all of my students.

There is nothing more rewarding to me than seeing a first-generation student that I have mentored walk through commencement—or go on to become a professor, like me!

Read more about OHIO's First-Generation Student Success Program.

Dr. Julie Suhr’s area of specialty is clinical neuropsychology, which she views as an integration of clinical psychology and neuroscience, or as her students put it, “keeping the psychology in neuropsychology.” 

Featured Photo by Joel Prince