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Side Doors And Unspoken Rules Are Key To Success, And Mentors Can Help First-Gen Students Find Them

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College can change the trajectory of a young person’s life.

That’s something I say a lot, because the data back me up. As Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce has reported, college graduates will earn 75 percent more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school degree.

And when you’re the first in your family to go to college, a bachelor’s degree can transform not only your life but also the trajectory of your family. At Pace University, where about 40 percent of each incoming class is comprised of first-generation students, about a third of all students are eligible for federal Pell grants, which means their family has an annual income of no more than $60,000. For our Class of 2021, the average starting salary of a Pace bachelor’s graduate was $63,397. In other words, that college degree can launch a low-income family into the middle class.

It’s why it’s so crucial to ensure that all students — especially those from underrepresented communities, those from low-income families, and those who are the first in their families to attend college — not only enroll in a college or university but persist to graduating and get started on a great career.

But it’s not always easy, especially when there’s no one in your family who’s traveled that road before.

As a onetime first-gen student named Gorick Ng writes in his recent book, The Unspoken Rules, there are “certain ways of doing things” that people “expect but don’t explain.” Those unspoken rules, Ng writes, “are passed down from parent to child and from mentor to mentee, making for an uneven playing field between insiders and outsiders.”

The kid of a single mom who worked in a sewing machine factory and then providing child care, Ng was an outsider when he successfully applied to and enrolled at Harvard. He was still an outsider when he started work as a management consultant. He knew that to get ahead he had to understand what the insiders understood, and so he started a project to figure it out. He spoke to hundreds of successful professionals to ask what mistakes people make in their careers, what they would do differently, and what separates the best performers from the mediocre ones. The result is his book, and his newfound calling helping first-generation students to get ahead.

“When I got to Harvard, I realized that people whose parents were doctors, lawyers, executives, were navigating the system in a very different way than I was,” he told me when we recently caught up on Zoom. Hard work, he came to realize, isn’t enough. It’s a baseline. “You need the ability to get things done and done well, you need to sell yourself and your ideas, and then you also need to know how to work the system.”

Insiders — people whose parents and families have been to college, have developed professional careers — know how to work the system. First-gen students, students from marginalized communities, may not.

Ng’s book contains a lot of smart ideas and strategies about how to get ahead at work, about understanding that displaying competence isn’t enough. “For every front door there’s a side door,” he said to me. “For every advertised opportunity there’s an unadvertised opportunity. And for every spoken rule there’s an unspoken rule.” The real key to success is learning about those side doors, those unadvertised opportunities, and those unspoken rules.

So how can a first-gen student learn all that, whether in college or in their career?

The key, Ng argues, is mentorship. Find someone who’s been in your shoes before, he says, and get advice from them on how to walk the path.

I’ve long been a big advocate for mentorship. I think mentors are critical for both academic and career success. And I think mentorship carries real benefits for mentors as well as for mentees. But I worry that it can be hard for some students, and especially first-gen students, to find valuable mentors with whom they can relate.

“When it comes to finding mentors, it’s actually easier than we think it is,” Ng said. “I think of mentors as people who know what you don’t know but should know,” he said. And that means there are plenty of people who can serve as mentors. All sorts of connections can be used to turn strangers into acquaintance, acquaintances into allies, and a select few allies into mentors. “Giving yourself credit for the people you already know is a first step,” Ng said.

You can often connect best with people who’ve shared similar life experiences. Coming from the same town, studying the same field, sharing an interest in the same music or movie or hobby or subject — those can all form the bonds that build relationships. And when you define mentors as people who can help you to know things you don’t yet know, any one of those relationships can turn into mentorship.

As educators and parents, we can help turn outsiders into insiders not only by sharing our own knowledge, but also by making sure the students and young professionals we interact with know they need to learn about those side doors and unspoken rules. Even when we don’t have the specific knowledge they’ll need, we can make a real difference by making sure they understand that knowledge is out there — and findable, with the right mentors.

That might be the biggest unspoken rule: You can always find people to help you, and you just have to look to find them. We owe it to all our students to make sure they know that.

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