UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #709

Overall Research Project Description The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry is to better understand the experiences of first generation in college students (FGCSs) who have received the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. This study will help explain how the FGCS participants themselves understand their experiences with the Gilman Scholarship and the role they feel the program played in their post-graduation lives. Underrepresentation within education abroad for FCGSs remains a federal and higher education institutional concern, especially since the literature suggests these students experience amplified benefit from engaging internationally. The Gilman Scholarship, then, provides a crucial tool for addressing this underrepresentation, since 50% of the Gilman Scholarship awardees identify as first generation in college students (Gilman Scholarship, n.d.). Currently, there is limited investigation of the outcomes of the Gilman Scholarship program (Stedman, 2017; Valuy & Shao, 2021) and minimal scholarship that explores the specific experiences of FGCSs within the Gilman Scholarship program as disaggregated from other underrepresented students (Garner, 2018; Thompson-Jones, 2012). It is not known how FGCSs understand their experiences with the Gilman Scholarship, particularly in terms of how they perceive the impacts of their participation in the program on their longer-term personal, social, academic, and professional trajectories. As a narrative inquiry, this project will utilize focus group, creative reflection/data elicitation (i.e. "Cabinet of Curiosities" and narrative timeline), and individual interviews for data collection.