First-gen Student Belonging at St. Thomas

The University of St. Thomas is a medium-sized private institution located in St. Paul, MN. As we continue to enhance our current efforts to assist and support first-generation students, our 2021-2022 Proud to Be First strategic plan is focused on four priorities:

1. Providing ongoing meaningful programs for undergraduate first-generation students

2. Researching and developing programs to support first-generation graduate students

3. Hosting professional development opportunities for faculty and staff

4. Supporting the needs of the parents and families of first-generation students

These priorities were developed through a collaborative effort with our campus first-generation advisory board and were informed by a Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The Future of Gen Z” (Sellingo, 2021).

We believe these efforts will allow us to provide more robust programming, include more students in our first-generation efforts, and, more importantly, expand our reach to those who support first-generation students.

Often, first-generation efforts are focused on undergraduate students. However, we know there are many first-generation students who are in graduate school. Over the next year, we will research the needs of first-generation graduate students and how we can support these students on their academic journey.

As we continue to deepen our work with first-gen students on campus, we are turning to the work of Lisa Nunn in her book College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate College Life (2021). Nunn encourages us to examine three different areas of first-generation student belonging: academic, social, and community. We would like to share a few examples of how our fall programs supported these different areas of belonging. 

We hosted a welcome reception for first-gen students prior to classes starting. First-gen faculty and staff were also in attendance. This was a program that helped foster community belonging. Our program on navigating the hidden curriculum helped to build academic belonging. In order to create opportunities to develop social belonging, we hosted a bowling night and a hot cocoa/bonfire outdoor gathering. Our goal is to work intentionally to make sure our Proud to Be First programs support belonging in all three of these domains.

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For more information on University of St. Thomas’s approach, please visit their website here.

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References

Nunn, L. M. (2021). College belonging: How first-year and first-generation students navigate campus life. Rutgers University Press.

Sellingo, J. J. (2021). The Future of Gen Z: How COVID-19 will shape students and higher education for the next decade. The Chronicle of Higher Education.