What Happens When A High School Student from Mesa Goes to Ivy League Yale?

Having had a 1st-Generation American-born father, the last child of 14 from a fertile couple who emigrated here from The Azores in the early 1900's who became a two-time All-American football player at Notre Dame, your MesaZona blogger got curious reading this article from Yale News about a 1st-generation high school student from here in Mesa with different circumstances ....and what he said about his high school education here in Mesa different from all the hype.

Rayan Alsemeiry

Rayan Alsemeiry ’19 arrived at Yale last year from Mesa, Arizona. His family had emigrated to the United States from Saudi Arabia when he was 3 years old, and is in the first generation of his family to attend college. In addition to the usual adjustments to campus life that most freshman face, Alsemeiry struggled to get his bearings in an unfamiliar culture.
“Everyone here [at Yale] seemed to have a sense of direction — to know where they’re going and what they want to get out of college,” says Alsemeiry.
“I came from a large public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigor.” 

According to the article- in addition to attending a public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigors - he was both high-achieving from a low-income family - who gained entry to one of the most highly-respected universities in the world, Yale.
It wasn’t until the first semester of his sophomore year before he felt truly at home, he says.
Nearly 400 first-generation students like Alsemeiry are coming to Yale Friday-Sunday, Feb. 24-26 to discuss their common challenges and ways to overcome them at the third annual 1vyG Conference. Alsemeiry and Laura Plata ’19 are co-chairing the event, which will bring together first-generation, high-achieving, low-income students from the 19 top U.S. colleges and universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and MIT — including 25 delegates from Yale.

The annual conference is presented by the Inter-Ivy, First-Generation College Student Network (1vyG), a network of students and administrators aimed at building best practices and advocating for institutional change to increase first-generation students’ chances at success in both their academic and professional careers.
The first conference was held at Brown; the second at Harvard . . .
“One of the biggest hurdles as a first-generation student is that you don’t have a lot of knowledge about the professional world,” says Alsemeiry, who is also co-chairing the conference’s finance committee, which raised over $155,000 and received sponsorship from companies like Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, DE Shaw, Teach for America, and more.
The ultimate goal of the 1vyG conference is to raise awareness of the challenges faced by first-generation students and “to provide people with the information and tools to organize and push for more acceptance of this community at top colleges,” says Alsemeiry.
The Yale sophomore — who is now a campus tour guide and economics tutor and helps run a peer liaison group for low-income students in Yale College — is majoring in Economics and Global Affairs, and a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Program in Human Rights. In the future, he says, he wants to continue to work to improve access to education on a global scale, thereby breaking a cycle that “perpetuates poverty and inequality.”

The entire article can be accessed here at Yale News