{"id":1088,"date":"2020-04-30T02:31:33","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T02:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/?p=1088"},"modified":"2021-06-01T01:43:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T01:43:37","slug":"dalina-phomphengchane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/2020\/04\/30\/dalina-phomphengchane\/","title":{"rendered":"Dalina Phomphengchane"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.0.11″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]\u201cBeing first-gen to me means being \u2018first.\u2019 It\u2019s kind of like being first in a race or being first in a competition. You\u2019re the first in your family to take that step into higher education and paving the way for future members of your family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn my family, education was always a huge priority because my parents valued higher education as a gateway to better opportunities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy school was a small, private Christian school. My family wasn\u2019t Christian. It\u2019s just that my parents are immigrants from a small country called Laos, and over there, private school education is better. So, they sent me there because it was a private school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou had to pay tuition, and we didn\u2019t have a comfortable financial background. We would struggle to meet the monthly payments for tuition every month.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it was either my freshman year or my eighth-grade year. My school wouldn\u2019t give you your class schedule if you didn\u2019t pay your tuition on time. I didn\u2019t know my parents didn\u2019t pay, so I got there and they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, you can\u2019t have your schedule. It\u2019s on hold.\u2019 and I was just like, \u2018Oh, I don\u2019t know what to do.\u2019 I was completely worried that I couldn\u2019t start school on time because my parents didn\u2019t pay for it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time, because I was young, I was angry at my parents. Looking back on it now that I\u2019m older, I shouldn\u2019t have done that. I should have been more understanding because we didn\u2019t have money.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a special case for me to be a lower-income student placed in a private school area, where mostly everybody around you was not lower income. My parents worked super long hours to make sure I had what I needed or what I wanted in order to fit in and assimilate with the culture that was going on around where I\u2019m from.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI felt very alone because everybody else wasn\u2019t first-gen. Everybody knew what they were doing and their parents knew what they were doing, and my parents didn\u2019t know anything about the application process at all. It was an unknown territory for all of us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of it was just like how to apply for college or what colleges to even look at because I couldn\u2019t ask my parents anything about it. FAFSA was the biggest part. I had to do that all by myself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times, people with privilege don\u2019t know how lucky they are or how normal it is for them to know what they\u2019re doing, and how unnormal it seems for us to know what they\u2019re doing. I feel like a lot of people with privilege take their schooling for granted. They don\u2019t have to worry about their grades slipping that they might lose their scholarship. They don\u2019t have to worry about future debts or making sure they have their tuition payment on time. They can not show up to class, but then if we don\u2019t show up to class, that\u2019s money lost. That\u2019s another skill we\u2019ve lost or an opportunity for us to be better for ourselves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy experience is not trying to make anyone feel bad for coming from a better place. I just want them to know that there are people struggling.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf resources aren\u2019t given to us, I feel like there\u2019s going to be a sense of hopelessness that we\u2019re never going to be able to move out from the spot that we\u2019re in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI always imagine a future where my kids don\u2019t struggle as much as my family did, or I don\u2019t have to work as hard as my parents did to provide for my kids.\u201d<\/span>
\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_button button_url=”https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/project\/road-to-ohio-state\/#dalina-phomphengchane” button_text=”Go back to full list” button_alignment=”center” _builder_version=”4.0.11″ custom_button=”on” button_text_color=”#000000″ button_font=”Georgia||||||||”][\/et_pb_button][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dalina Phomphengchane, a second-year in strategic communication, took her experiences as a first-generation college student and became a founding member of Buckeyes First, a student organization created to provide first-generation students with resources and community. As someone who navigated the college application process and financial aid on her own, Phomphengchane recognizes the challenge of that experience firsthand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4076,"featured_media":1043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"

\u201cBeing first-gen to me means being \u2018first.\u2019 It\u2019s kind of like being first in a race or being first in a competition. You\u2019re the first in your family to take that step into higher education and paving the way for future members of your family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cIn my family, education was always a huge priority because my parents valued higher education as a gateway to better opportunities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cYou had to pay tuition, and we didn\u2019t have a comfortable financial background. We would struggle to meet the monthly payments for tuition every month.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cMy experience is not trying to make anyone feel bad for coming from a better place. I just want them to know that there are people struggling.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cI always imagine a future where my kids don\u2019t struggle as much as my family did, or I don\u2019t have to work as hard as my parents did to provide for my kids.\u201d<\/span><\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hilton-sp2020"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/files\/2020\/04\/Dalina-Phomphengchane-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3276,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/3276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}