Penn first-generation students complete their first year wiser, stronger

Last in an occasional series that follows a group of first-generation college students through their freshman year at the elite University of Pennsylvania.

When his freshman year started last September, Anthony Scarpone-Lambert had a hard time seeing how working-class kids like him could find a place amid the brick and ivy of the University of Pennsylvania campus.

But at the end of spring semester, there was the 18-year-old from Chalfont performing with Penn's Disney A Cappella group at Penn Children's Center, a day-care for university staffers. His voice blended seamlessly with 10 others on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

No one could discern which singers were from wealthy parents and which ones survived on scholarships.

All you could hear was music, bright and airy, sung by young people who belonged to the place emblazoned on Scarpone-Lambert's T-shirt: Penn.

Crossing over

With classes ended and finals underway, freshman first-generation Penn students — those whose parents didn't graduate from a four-year college — are 25 percent closer to leaving the working class.

They are what Minnesota psychologist Barbara Jensen calls "crossovers," advancing into the sanctified territories of the upper classes. For them, Penn is rung No. 1 on the ladder of social mobility.

Scarpone-Lambert and four other crossovers began the year wondering whether they belonged, keenly aware of being among just 300 first-generation students in a class of 2,457 achievers.

They wrestled with self-doubt. They felt hindered as public high school graduates competing with prep-school grads and suburban kids whose parents smoothed the way. They were cash-poor in a place that drips affluence.

But something meaningful happened along the way. All five described the arc of their freshman year in roughly the same manner as Carmen Duran, 18, a half-Mexican public school student from Maiden, N.C, whose father is imprisoned:

"When I got here, I saw myself as very inferior. Now, I feel as capable as anyone."

The five prepare to leave campus for summer break aware of a resilience they never knew they possessed.

"At first I was terrified," said Haley Carbajal, 19, of Belle Fourche, S.D. "I'm from a place that left me academically unprepared. But now I know I can survive anything."

Scarpone-Lambert was "overwhelmed, but I pushed through." Like a lot of first-generation students, he saw the first low grades of his life at Penn.

"I went from A's to B's," Scarpone-Lambert said. "But I'm pretty freakin' proud of that, because I'm first-gen at Penn. The way I see it is, 'Oh, my God: Go, me!' "

While every freshman, regardless of economic background, faces challenges acclimating to college, first-generation students carry heavier book bags.

"Students from wealthier backgrounds never ask themselves, 'Do I belong here?' " said Missy Foy, the director of a program that works with low-income and first-generation students at Georgetown University. "That's because places like Penn were built for those students."

And, first-generation students, who already feel "so intensely socially different than the majority," are experiencing changes in their identities, said Deborah Warnock, an expert on first-generation students and a sociologist at Bennington College.

These kids are leaving one class for another. How, Warnock asks, do people change their class without devaluing who they are and where they came from?

"The narrative of upward mobility at an elite institution like Penn is one of celebration," Warnock said. " 'You've made it, you're going to be somebody now.'

"But that is very divisive for students and their families."

Duran and others talked about feeling disloyal to their parents, simply for going to school and leaving the people who launched them.

The result: "We're in different worlds now, my mother and me," Duran said.

Survival techniques

Daisy Angeles sat in the hushed interior of Jon Huntsman Hall at the Wharton School at Penn, a soaring, secular cathedral to business.

Unlike other students pursuing internships for the summer, Angeles, 18, the oldest of seven children of immigrant parents from Oaxaca, Mexico, will work as a secretary in her uncle's auto window-tinting shop near her home in Yakima, Wash.

Initially believing she was an impostor who was wrongly accepted by Penn, Angeles ultimately decided she belonged after long, hard days. Along the way, she accepted that she's a "double minority" — Latina and first-generation.

"Embrace the minorities you are, and bring that," she told herself. That's how you survive Penn.

After a year in which she sat with classmates who'd attended environmental conferences overseas while still in high school, Angeles said she's become much more aware of  societal stratification.

"Class is so ingrained here, but I accept it as a reality," she said. "I'm simply working toward a middle-class life, different than my parents'. It's just how things are."

While she's convinced that she can make it at Penn like Angeles, Haley Carbajal said that she's adapted certain survival techniques.

"I wear a mask around higher-class people here," she said. "I don't talk about being first-generation, or about money. You can feel like a charity case here."

Carbajal has tired of turning down invitations to socialize with people because she can't afford it.

She now dates junior Shay Moon, whose parents are educated, though not wealthy. She said he helps her. "He buys me lunch and won't ask me to pay on a date," she said.

"Penn is a lot about what your parents do and where you come from, and I want Haley to be happy," Moon said.

Carbajal is grateful to be at Penn, and to have been given a generous financial aid package.

But she feels that she shoulders greater pressure to do well than non-first-generation students.

"I have to succeed, because my parents can't support me much more," she said. "I have their future to look out for."

It's a start

Tiffany Wong sat for a rare quiet moment in the sun outside a campus-area Starbucks.

"I thought I'd struggle more here," said Wong, 18, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant and a refugee from Vietnam. "But I got used to it."

Still, she's always been aware of Penn's class divide, symbolized for her by Canada Goose coats, which cost $900 and more, and were favored in winter by her wealthier classmates. Wong said she was saddened when a first-generation friend got a Canada Goose coat from a relative. "He changed; he said he wanted to fit in with the Canada Goose kids. For me, I wanted to stay true to myself."

Aware she's on a trajectory to a higher class, Wong predicted: "I'll still feel first-generation. Money won't change me." It will be her duty, she said, to give back to Oakland.

Wong noted that the university, whose president, Amy Gutmann, is herself first-generation, increased the fraction of first-generation students in this year's incoming class from one-eighth to one-seventh.

"It's a start, right?" Wong said. "It'd be a culture shock if all of a sudden we had a swarm of first-generation students."

During her first year, Wong, like her classmates, came to terms with who she is, and who she is becoming.

As Carmen Duran said: "I wasn't even sure if being first-gen was a weakness or a strength, at first. But now I'm proud of it. Even if my parents didn't go to college, I know now I'm capable of graduating, and I'm still worthy to be here with people whose parents have degrees.

"Now I'm happy with myself. And that makes me strong."