My book on first-gen college students and grad school will be released in May 2026. You pre-order through Amazon! It will have all of the information that I’ve been covering on this site and a ton more. It’s full of humor, heart and inside information about applying to graduate school as a first-generation college student!…

What is a CV? Most programs ask you for a CV as part of your application package. If you are like me you definitely knew what that was before hand and you DID NOT have to furiously google it when you reached that part of your application. It sounds scary but the CV is basically…

Quick tips for researching grad schools Now that we are in September a lot of you are researching grad programs and are trying to find out as much as you can about the programs you are interested in applying to. One place to start is to search for the “Office of Graduate Studies” and the…

Letters of Recommendation Two big things you need to know about letters of recommendation. The first is that you need more than one letter one time, and you letter needs to tell the readers a lot more about you than you might expect from work letters. The second, is that letters of recommendation are not…

Many of us as first-gen students have done this passively, as we take the bus into school, as we wait for our food in a restaurant, or in the back of our mind when we’re at the gym. But how often have you been able to really sit for a period of time and think…

You need to think about what your radius is. What I mean is this, there aren’t colleges in every town, let alone two. If you are going to apply to multiple programs then you need to be prepared that this might mean moving, or at the very least, commuting. Knowing this, you need to think…