Generations of Education

By Haley Morrill

“The first few days in college for me, as I recall, were pretty confusing, almost like a kaleidoscope.”

Haley: Hi. I'm Haley Morrill, and today I am talking with my dad about him being a first-generation college student. My dad's view of education all started with his parents and their experience in the academic system.

Dad: Well, my mother went to K–12 school in Texas in the early part of the twentieth century. She graduated high school in the 1930s, and my father graduated high school in the early 1940s. And so for them, finishing high school, especially for my mother in a rural area, was a big deal. Not everybody did. For my father, who grew up here in the Bay Area, grew up in, um… San Francisco and in Oakland, it wasn't as big a deal to finish high school, but still a lot of people didn't. And of course my parents always valued education because neither of them really had much of a chance to go beyond.

Haley: And then many years later, my dad got introduced to college through something he loved.

Dad: Um, I did a lot of sports when I was in high school and I wound up being pretty good at running track. I ran the half mile. So, my… introduction to thinking about college was really through that, through sports. I was interested in going to college to run track, quite frankly.

Haley: My dad then got accepted to UCSB, and started attending UCSB in the fall of 1976.

Dad: It was… the first few days in college for me, as I recall, were pretty confusing, almost like a kaleidoscope. In fact, I can still remember… so I lived in a dorm right off the campus of UCSB that was a combination athletic dorm and then a whole bunch of people who were just regular students. And so, it was pretty wild. It was the fall of 1976… my parents drove me up to Santa Barbara, and I was sharing a suite of… and I can still recall right at the end of the afternoon, my parents were ready to drive back to Los Angeles, and I can still see us, all three of us, my father, my mother and myself were all wondering, "Okay, now what do we do?" And finally my mother, as she was wont to do, she took charge of the situation and she said, "Okay, well, Cal, I think it's time for us to go. Give us a call the next week," and that was it, and you know, I hugged her and kissed her, and hugged my dad, and off they went, and off I went. And then in the next couple of days, the thing that organized everything for me and kept me grounded was I already had a schedule of workouts with the track team, and I could already go over to the track, which was very near where I was, where the dorm was. And that kept me… kind of going.

Haley: At the end of his four years at UCSB, my dad got to experience a momentous day: his graduation day.

Dad: It felt great! I was the first person in my family to graduate. They were so excited. They were just… they were over the moon, um… and my sister came, and I mean she was excited, she was very happy for me. It wasn't her path, but it was my path and that was great. And it was a really momentous occasion because I was the first person to graduate and then I was going to go to graduate school.

Haley: So as I listened to my dad's experience, I realized that even though I'm now entering into a long and sometimes stressful period of applying to colleges myself, I benefit from having someone who blazed a successful path before me and can now help me do the same.