Dr. Michelle S. Rebelsky, First-Generation Student (#1375)

Topics/tags: Michelle

Yesterday, Eldest Son and I had the privilege of joining the Alumni Council at the official inauguration of Grinnell’s First-Generation and Low-Income Lounge, a place for FGLI students to gather, relax, and form community. Why were we there? Because we donated to have the lounge named in memory of Michelle and to support activities for the FGLI community.

In honor of the occasion—and, more importantly, in honor of Michelle—I wanted to write about why we chose to support the FGLI community and the lounge and to tell some stories about Michelle’s experience as a first-gen student. Let’s start with the naming.

Almost exactly a year ago, I was having coffee with Vivek Venugopal ’01 in Saints Rest. Vivek—who is a friend, one of my favorite alums, and partially responsible for me being named an honorary member of the class of ’01—was a member of Grinnell’s Alumni Council. Amidst our long (but not long enough) conversation, Vivek mentioned that the Alumni Council had launched a fundraising project for the new FGLI lounge, primarily to renovate and furnish the space. Michelle had passed only a month before, and it struck me that not only was the lounge something she would have enthusiastically supported, it was also a chance to memorialize her.

Donating a relatively large amount for a space for low-income students seems, at first glance, somewhat contradictory. However, it also represented a valuable narrative: Michelle had gone from a first-gen student to someone whose family could afford to name a space in her memory. I also expected that the College would put the naming money to good use.

Before doing anything else, I checked with the boys. They agreed that doing something related to FGLI students would be a good way to honor her. She was a first-gen student; neither parent had attended college, and her father hadn’t even finished high school (although he earned a GED later in life). Given that the Steeles owned a house, I struggle to call them low income. However, I also know they regularly encountered weeks when their expenses outstripped their income, and they only got by because her father did a lot of side work.

My next step was to talk with Adam Laug in Development and Alumni Relations (DAR). I didn’t want to step on any toes, so I wanted to make sure that the Alumni Council would be okay with the naming. It also seemed best for them (or them working with Maggie Bell, our Associate Director of First-Generation & Low-Income Student Programs at Grinnell College) to determine how any donation should be spent. Fortunately, they supported the naming and had good ideas of how to spend the donation. The Alumni Council had also raised a substantial amount themselves, more than enough to renovate, furnish, and equip the room.

And here we are. The lounge has been open for a few weeks and has now been officially inaugurated. Soon, it will be officially named. I don’t think Michelle would care about the naming (at least one son suggests she would have preferred to be more anonymous), but I’m still glad she’ll be associated with it.

As I noted, I partly wanted to name the lounge so that it could serve as an aspirational lesson: Michelle went from being a first-gen student to a successful physician, even as she faced many obstacles that come with being an FGLI student. I had some vignettes in mind. However, as I consider them, I realize that most of them are more likely to provide lessons for faculty than for FGLI students; the students already know enough about these kinds of obstacles.

We’ll start with one from the end of Michelle’s college career, before we got married. She’d applied to medical school and had not been admitted in spite of having a Chemistry major from the University of Chicago and having worked with Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins (and another lab I forget). She had, however, obtained a post-graduation position in Janet Rowley’s lab. Still, at graduation, her mother said something like, You never learned how to type; how are you going to get a good job?

That experience, like many I hear from my FGLI students, reminds me of the disconnect that many students face when talking to their families about their academic work and accomplishments. Why is it important that you got a job in a lab, that your paper praised your ideas about a piece of literature, that you found a new way to prove a theorem? Why should you take a low-paying summer research position rather than returning home for the job you worked in high school? Or, from the other side, how can a student explain the details of their work with their parents?

Next, we’ll jump back to the start of Michelle’s college career. As I recall the story, Michelle was in an introductory sociology class, and the class had just read about people in Chicago who gather bricks from the sites of demolished buildings. The instructor said something like And, believe it or not, these people even make their children help. Michelle, who fondly recalled the time spent gathering bricks with her father, said something like, But they were good bricks; they were going to let them go to waste! Or maybe she just thought it to herself; I can’t imagine what it’s like to be so implicitly called out by a faculty member.

The lessons for faculty from this vignette are primarily that we should not make assumptions about our students, and, more importantly, that we should remember they can come from very different backgrounds than we do. I recall conversations with colleagues wherein we’ve discussed the cultural assumptions that accompany, say, using NPR in a class and assuming everyone understands. More importantly, when we talk about minoritized groups, whether students of color or students from a particular country, we risk calling out the students from those groups.

There’s also another assumption at play in this story. The instructor acted as if the parents were inappropriately forcing their kids to work. However, Michelle and her brother’s experience was quite different; they wanted to do help. First of all, the loved spending time with their father, no matter what they were doing. Next, they liked feeling like they were doing useful: As Michelle suggested, they were good bricks; her brother tells me that they supported projects throughout the neighborhood. Finally, what kid doesn’t like playing in dirt?

Our next vignette isn’t so much of a vignette as a continuous story, and it has to do with work. Michelle chose to come to the UofC, rather than UIUC, even though it would cost more. That meant she needed to work to help pay for her education. (She also took out a lot of loans.) In addition to working in a research lab, she also worked for campus security. If I recall correctly, that even included overnight shifts. But that wasn’t enough. Since the UofC limited the number of hours you could work, she leveraged her high-school job at Walgreens to get a pharmacy tech job at the local Walgreens.

I must admit that I also worked more hours than UofC permitted; I did so because I enjoyed working and because it gave me spare cash, not because I had to. When they found out that I was working more than twenty hours per week, I turned some of my work into volunteering. Michelle would not have been able to do so.

Michelle also returned to her local Walgreens for work during every break. Unlike students who could take breaks as a time to relax, she needed to earn the extra money for herself and her family.

As I regularly suggest to administrators and to colleagues, many of our students, particularly our FGLI students, need to do a lot of paid work. And, as in Michelle’s case, the institution may not know about all of the paid work they do. We also have some students who have to work extra hours to contribute to their families, which Michelle had to do from time to time.

Knowing about these potential challenges should affect our practices in many ways. I strive to say to myself, I don’t know everything that’s going on in their lives outside of my class, and to accommodate their special requests without asking for the reasons for those requests. I also try not to make assumptions about students’ ability to pay for things.

I mentioned that Michelle sometimes had to contribute to family expenses. Our final vignette reflects on one of those times. Her father had broken his leg, surgery hadn’t gone well, and he was home much longer than they expected. There were, of course, financial worries. But Michelle and her family were also worried about his health. I think there was even a point when they were afraid about what was happening with a blood clot created by the injury or surgery. As you might expect, Michelle struggled with her academic work that quarter. But she didn’t talk to her faculty or ask for help. It never occurred to her that she could. I also expect that she said something to herself like, Put on your big girl panties and deal with it. It wasn’t until her second time applying to graduate school, when one of her research directors asked about the drop in her grades and said that they’d write about those challenges, that Michelle realized that people with more social capital might have asked their faculty to give her some slack in her work.

I use stories like this to remind myself about my moral from the above: I don’t know everything that’s going on in others’ lives, and I should be kind when they ask for or seem to need extra time or extra help. I hope everyone—whether faculty, staff, or student—remembers that. I also hope that our students, whether FGLI or not, recognize the importance of asking others for help. I know that’s a lesson Michelle would have wanted to share.

And there you have it. A few stories about Michelle’s experiences as an FGLI student. I don’t think she would have minded me sharing; she certainly shared them with selected people. More than anything, I hope they remind us that one can persist through obstacles and succeed. I hope they also remind us that it’s good to ask others for help.

I should also note that Michelle would never have used these stories to ask for sympathy. Rather, they would have been statements of how things were. I know she felt fortunate to have a good childhood and time in college. Even if she faced more challenges than many peers, she also had a great family support system.

Version 1.0 of 2025-11-09.