Hawa Tunkara '21 FLI Story Collection

The Hawa Tunkara ‘21 FLI Story Collection was created in order to spotlight the first-generation and/or low-income student experience at Columbia University. The inspiration for the collection came from the donor’s own experience learning how to traverse and maneuver college life as the first in her family to do so. She was a part of the Higher Educational Opportunity Program (HEOP) and found that there were no real ties or connections being built with the alums who graduated from the program. As a result, a large part of the narrative for how students who were either first in their families, or came from lower socioeconomic background, went undocumented. Tunkara attended the annual FGLI Conference hosted at Cornell University early in 2020 and from this experience her want to tell this story only grew. She not only wanted to know the experience of those who had already graduated from Barnard and Columbia but also to document current FLI student’s experiences.

The audio and video interviews for the class of 2021 and 2023 students were conducted virtually between September 2020 and December 2020. The written pieces and art pieces by the class of 2021 were collected between September 2020 and June 2021. The alum blog post interviews were conducted between October 2021 until April 2021.