When you’re the first in your family to go to college, you never truly feel like you’re there on your own.
-- Crucet ("What We Pack")

Importance: Here, Crucet writes that for most students, an exhilarating moment of freedom and relief accompany the moment their parents leave them at college. But for first-generation college students like Crucet, they never have this feeling because their whole families are present in the college experience in that the student becomes the hope of the family's future, the person that will unlock spaces and privileges unknown to previous generations and will pave the way for them.

I remember it had the word intersectionalities in it. And the word gendered. I waited for her response and for the ways it would encourage me, for her to tell me I could do this, but I knew from my mother’s total silence that, like me, she’d never before heard...
-- Crucet ("What We Pack")