Our Our interviewees clearly showed struggles between race, gender, culture and communities. They also expressed that college helped them transform and allowed them to become stronger individuals. College gave them self-awareness. Their new epistemologies challenged their family beliefs. We found that gender played the biggest role with the women interviewees when confronting culture. Many had to renegotiate with their families and did so with pain and joy. Some had to go home a lot to visit or making continous phone calls to reassure their families that they were okay. Gender also played some role with the men because they felt a sense of power with their new awareness - a way to challenge the world and the system that kept them oppressed. They also felt a sense of responsibility to their culture and community and had to prove they could make it on their own. Another similarity among these first-generation students we discovered were barriers, for example the tracking system and class status. These barriers continuously challenged first generation students because we found this kind of oppression starts early in our educational system. Some of them never imagined themselves in a four-year University. What became very apparent was that support programs helped them overcome some of these barriers. They were not prepared early on for their new epistemology but having these support programs made it easier to deal with. F.O.C.U.S. was a big support for many of these interviewees. Academic Skills Achievement Program. was another support service mentioned. The interviewees felt that some support programs needed work; the Migrant Program was mentioned but most of these support programs were helpful in college. These first generations students felt a sense of commonality within the support groups; they felt connected enough and this kept them from failing. On the contrary most of them were over achievers with excellent grades.