By Rachel Aretakis

Adjusting to college life is more difficult for some students than others.

As the first person in her entire family to attend college, junior Andrea Corkran faced other issues that most students do not experience.

“[First semester] was rough… you get really homesick, of course, and your family is supportive but can’t aid you in the way it is needed because they don’t know what is going on in college,” Corkran said about her freshman year.

For most first-generation and nontraditional students, this is a common experience.

Lydia Wims, Director of Student Support Services, said first-generation and nontraditional students find their first semester more difficult than other students do.

Wims works with both first-generation and nontraditional students in Student Support Services, which is a federally funded program that focuses on the retention and graduation rates of first-generation, low income and disability students.

A first-generation student is defined as a student whose parents do not have a bachelor’s degree. A nontraditional student is someone who is starting school at age 24 or above.

Wims said the transition for first-generation students is especially harder because “they have not had the experience of their parents telling them what to expect when they go to college.”

Students generally do not know college terminology and how to navigate processes such as applying for financial aid, she said.

Wims said that for both first-generation and nontraditional students, their second semester is much easier, especially if they have found a support system.

About one in five incoming students at UK are first-generation students, said Matthew Deffendall, Director of the First Scholars Program.

First-generation students represent 17 percent of the incoming freshman class, whereas nontraditional students represent about 10 percent of the UK student population in 2009, according to the Office of Institutional Research.

Both groups of students are considered a part of the underrepresented group of students, Wims said.

Though they fall under the same category of “underrepresented students”, first-generation and nontraditional students face different problems.

“One of the things that research tells us is that first-generation students lack in the understanding of the college student role,” Deffendall said. “So they don’t understand the language of college, and they don’t have anyone in their support structure to explain it to them.”

A student whose parents went to college has parents who can advise them when the student experiences adversity because they have been through similar experiences, Deffendall said.

He said the parents can offer guidance, such as going to a professor’s office hours or getting a tutor, and that “oftentimes, first generation parents don’t have that frame of reference” because they did not attend college.

The retention rate for first-generation students is much less than that of their peers, Deffendall said.

The Office of Institutional Research reported that there is an 8 percent difference in first- year retention rate for first-generation students compared to the general population.

The gap tends to widen over a four-year period, Deffendall said.

As first-generation students deal with college terminology and the need for a support system at school, Wims said that nontraditional students face different issues and have different motivations for going to school.

“Most of [nontraditional students] are coming back to school because they were laid off from their job, or they are going to school in order to get the skills to make opportunities for them a little bit better,” Wims said.

Issues nontraditional students face tend to focus on fitting in and the ability to relate to other students in the classroom, Wims said.

Jacqui Denegri, a nontraditional student who recently graduated in December, said she decided to return to college because she could not advance at her job as a bilingual staffing coordinator. She was out of school for 20 years before she decided to get a degree in Spanish.

“At first it was difficult. I was intimidated sometimes by the younger kids,” Denegri said.

She said that it was sometimes hard for her as an over 30 college student because she had different priorities than most of her classmates, like her daughter.

Denegri said that it eventually became easier as she connected with other nontraditional students.

She also realized that her life experience could help her younger classmates, and that they “traded off.” She would give advice about everything from dating to jobs, and they would help her develop better studying techniques.

Though Denegri and Corkran experienced different problems, they both said that their college experience became much easier after their first semester.

They have faced difficulties that most UK students do not, but finally say they have acclimated to college life and are in the process of making future plans.