Carrying more than just a backpack: Being a first-generation student at UC Berkeley.
I was in the middle of a shift at Panda Express when my phone buzzed at 4 p.m. Then it buzzed again. I had gotten into UC Berkeley and an Ivy League university on the same day, at the same time, while I was standing there in my uniform with nowhere quiet to process what had just happened. The people around me had no idea. I barely had an idea myself. I had spent so much of my life convinced that college was something that happened to other people, people whose paths were cleaner and more straightforward than mine, and here I was holding two acceptance letters.
I had moved to the United States from the Philippines, and the version of high school I experienced looked nothing like what college applications seemed to be built around. My attendance was inconsistent, my extracurriculars were sparse, and the path I had taken to get here was one I had mostly pieced together on my own out of necessity rather than strategy. That moment at Panda Express was the first time I let myself consider that maybe the path I had taken wasn’t a liability, but was actually the point.
When I moved, none of my high school credits transferred. In 10th grade, that meant being placed into ninth grade-level classes and essentially starting over. Then COVID arrived and scrambled everything further. My attendance record during that period was, to put it honestly, pretty bad. I had often chosen to pick up a work shift over going to school, because that was what the moment required of me. There were no after-school clubs, no carefully curated activities, no college counselor walking me through a four-year plan. What I had instead was a job, a family that needed support, and a very finite amount of time to figure out how to make something work.
The workaround I found was dual enrollment. I was able to earn an Intersegmented General Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC) certification and an associate’s degree by taking community college courses simultaneously with my high school classes, which let me transfer 70 units to Berkeley as an incoming freshman. I was essentially speedrunning a process that most students move through over four years, and for a long time, I worried that admissions offices would see that irregularity and count it against me. I thought the gaps and detours would read as deficiencies. What I understand now, having come out the other side, is that none of it was a gap at all. It was resilience, the kind that shows up when you simply have no other option and you figure it out anyway.
Learning to ask for help as a first-generation student
There is something particular about the experience of being first-generation that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it, and it has less to do with logistics than it does with the feeling of having no map. In a lot of Filipino households, asking for help carries a kind of inherited shame to it, something I’ve always thought about through the lens of utak talangka, the crab mentality, the idea that crabs in a bucket will pull each other back down rather than let one escape, and that showing vulnerability or need only invites that kind of pulling. It is a survival instinct baked into a culture that has had to survive a great deal, but it also means that the people who most need help are often the least likely to reach out for it. I grew up absorbing that instinct, and coming to college meant having to consciously work against it.
Posing in front of Sather Gate with family.
I was the first person in my family to attend college, and my parents were not working and had no savings to speak of. The questions that filled my head before my first semester were relentless, and they all circled the same thing: survival. How do I pay for this? What even is FAFSA, and how do I fill it out correctly? How do I support my family while I am also a full-time student? What happens if I make a wrong move and there is nothing to catch me? These anxieties were real and immediate, and the weight of them sat underneath everything else I was trying to navigate. There was no fallback, no cushion, no one ahead of me in the family who had already figured this out and could tell me what to do next. I was walking into an institution built around assumptions I didn’t share, carrying questions that most of the people I was surrounded with had never had to ask.
The first thing that actually helped me was Reddit, specifically, r/berkeley. I spent hours reading through posts from current students, former students, and other incoming first-years who were trying to figure out the same things I was. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t the mentorship I probably needed, but it gave me a starting point when I had very little else to work from. I began applying for jobs before I even set foot on campus, and by the time I arrived I had lined up a position as a Peer Advisor at Cal Student Central and a front-of-house associate at Endless Summer Sweets. I knew I needed income, and I knew I needed to move quickly.
Choosing UC Berkeley
The moment that actually decided everything, the thing that made me choose Berkeley over the Ivy League school, was Senior Weekend. Organized through Pilipinx Academic Student Services, known as PASS, Senior Weekend is a three-day, two-night program that flies out high school seniors who identify as first-generation and low-income during Cal Day weekend to experience Berkeley with assigned mentors. I had no idea what to expect going in, and what I found was a room full of people who felt like my people, students who had navigated versions of the same path I had, and who were genuinely excited to welcome someone else into it. That weekend, I met the people who would become my freshman year roommates. I left knowing that Berkeley was where I needed to be, not because of rankings or prestige, but because of the community I met there.
Moments from Senior Weekend.
When I arrived at Berkeley, one of the first programs I found was NavCal, short for Navigating Cal, which is built specifically for first-generation students and designed to give them the foundational knowledge that everyone else seems to already have. It gave me my footing in a way that nothing else did in those early weeks. What NavCal taught me sounds mundane on the surface: how to organize your Berkeley email, how to color-code your bCal, how to send a bCal, how to plan your courses, how to navigate the administrative layers of a large research university. But the thing about being first-generation is that these skills are not mundane at all, because no one handed them to you before you got here. Other students absorbed this kind of knowledge from parents who had been to college, from older siblings who had already figured it out, from a general cultural familiarity with how institutions like this operate. For a lot of us, NavCal was the place where we finally got the version of orientation we truly needed. If you are reading this as an incoming first-gen student who feels lost, that program is where I would send you first.
Becoming part of a community
Through all the pivots and pressures and moments of uncertainty, the parts of Berkeley that kept me grounded were the ones that had nothing to do with career trajectories or academic performance. I have always loved to sing, and joining the UC Men’s Octet was one of the purest joys of my time here. There is something about being in a group that makes music together, that rehearses and performs and travels and argues over arrangements, that gives you a kind of belonging that is hard to find anywhere else on a campus this large. It was one of the first places at Berkeley where I felt like I could just be a person, rather than a student navigating a system. But I also wanted to sing with my community specifically, with people who shared my background and understood the particular texture of growing up Filipino.
MAHIWAGA A Capella in front of Doe Library.
In the spring of my first year I founded MAHIWAGA A Cappella, a Filipino a cappella group at Berkeley built around the idea that our music, our languages, and our stories deserve a stage of their own. Choosing to take on a founding and administrative role rather than simply joining something that already existed was a deliberate decision: I wanted to build a space, not just occupy one, and I wanted it to be somewhere that students who looked and sounded like me could find the same sense of belonging I had been searching for since I arrived. I also found that home in Pilipinx Cultural Night, where the arts became, as they have always been for me, the place I go to exhale and remember who I am outside of everything else I am trying to carry.
MAHIWAGA A Cappella at sunset.
The thread that reflects my time at Berkeley, the thing that connects the Reddit deep dives before my first semester to the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS) in Pennsylvania to founding a space for Filipino students to sing together, is that I kept asking for help, even when every instinct I had inherited told me not to. I kept breaking the utak talangka cycle in small ways, one uncomfortable ask at a time, and every resource, community, and opportunity that shaped my experience here came from being willing to do that. NavCal, Data Scholars, MARC, Senior Weekend — none of it finds you if you stay closed off. You have to be willing to walk toward the thing that feels unfamiliar, and trust that there are people on the other side of it who are genuinely rooting for you to figure it out.
To the first-generation and low-income students who are coming to Berkeley next, I want you to know that the resources are here, the community is here, and the people who understand what you are carrying are here too. You are not behind because your path looks different. You have simply been building a different kind of foundation, and that foundation is more durable than you know. I came to Berkeley as someone who wasn’t sure they were supposed to be here. I am leaving as someone who helped build something for the people who come after them, and that feels like exactly the right way to go.
There’s so much going on here at Berkeley that you’ll always find your place amongst the hundreds of clubs and organizations waiting for you. You can delve deeper into something you already love or experiment with something new. What are the different student spaces and communities you’ve settled into, and how did you come across them?
Taking my graduating senior photos with two other UC Berkeley Life student colleagues.
Rico Bolos, Class of 2026, is majoring in neuroscience and minoring in computer science and public policy. Cover photo by Kay Karsono from the UC Berkeley Life Video Production Team.
Want more?
- Read Melissa’s advice on finding success as a first-generation college student.
- Are you a graduate student? Meet Kishen, a grad student with advice for you.
- Explore Hosea’s tips on finding balance at Cal.