“It’s Okay to Ask for Help”

Jesse Rascon ’19 was raised in Miami by his mother, a Cuban refugee. Angela Zhang ’20 spent much of her childhood in China after being born in New Jersey. It is difficult to imagine two people with more dissimilar backgrounds—they grew up a world apart, speaking different languages in different cultures. At Boston College, however, they sometimes felt as though they had more in common with each other than they did with many of their fellow students. 

For all the ways in which they were not alike, Rascon and Zhang shared something important, something that seemed to set them apart on a campus where, like at America’s other elite universities, students from privileged backgrounds are well represented. Both Rascon and Zhang came from financially challenged homes, and they were both the first in their family to attend college.

Things that other students just seemed to understand left Rascon and Zhang confused and unsettled. “I thought if you asked for help, the professor would think you don’t understand anything and that you’re dumb,” Zhang recalled. Rascon described similar feelings. In fact, he said, after “bombing” his first semester of Perspectives on Western Culture, “I wanted to transfer so many times.” 

Zhang nearly did. “I opened up an NYU transfer app and filled it out,” she said. But she never sent in the application. Instead, she began meeting with Erika Kiyono ’09, a counselor in Boston College’s Learning to Learn office, which supports disadvantaged and first-generation students. It came as a relief and a boost, Zhang said, “just knowing someone is willing to listen to your story and acknowledge what you’re going through.” The process helped turn things around for Zhang. And thanks to what happened next, it has started to do the same for many other Boston College students.

In addition to her work with Learning to Learn, Kiyono helps run the College Transition Program (CTP), a two-week summer program aimed at acclimating the 260 first-generation students who, on average, enroll each year at Boston College. In fall 2015, Kiyono had been contacted by Rascon, a freshman at the time, who had an idea for a club that would take the kind of support found in CTP and provide it to students all year long. Intrigued, Kiyono put Zhang in touch with Rascon in 2016, and the two students began the arduous process—“a lot of red tape,” Rascon said—of creating a new club, this one for students like themselves. It took a lot of work, Rascon said, but “so many administrators stuck their neck out with funding, support, patience, and mentorship.” In May 2017, the First-Generation Club of Boston College officially launched. Rascon (who graduated in May) was the club’s first president. Zhang (now a rising senior) took over in 2019.

Today the club has 270 members, and an eight-student executive board. Kiyono is the faculty/staff advisor. The First-Gen club hosts mixers and movie nights, offers mental health and mentoring sessions, and even welcomes recruiters—including those from Teach for America and Goldman Sachs. (Bonnie Fong ’92, a Goldman Sachs vice president and a former first-generation BC student herself, was instrumental in putting that event together. Rascon, meanwhile, is set to join the investment bank this summer as an analyst.) Other initiatives include pairing thirty students with faculty mentors, holding business-etiquette dinners, and traveling to first-generation-student conferences at Penn and Princeton (the latter with the help of Carroll School of Management alumni donors).

There are many ways to measure the success of the club, but for Zhang it all comes back to the help it provides for first-generation and disadvantaged students. “We’re acknowledging them and what they go through,” she said. “And we’re telling first-gen freshmen, especially, that it’s okay to ask for help.” ◽