<p>I'm applying to internships that favour "first-gen" people.... how would I be classified? My single mother has yet to put her political science degree to use (she ended up getting hired for architectural drafting based on her vocational qualifications); she got it at the age of 43. </p>
<p>My father (who holds various electrical engineering qualifications) was abusive and left the family when I was 10. I would say he's a biological father but not a "real" one. I mean, he's not paying for my education either.</p>
<p>You’re not a first generation college student. You have 2 parents with college degrees. That’s what matters. The students who need the boost have no parents with college degrees: Those students missed out on the benefits (vocabulary that one is exposd to, general knowledge including of the world of academia that their parents had) of having educated parents.</p>
<p>Do also Google yourself to see what interviewers and others may learn about you.</p>
<p>Yeah but I didn’t really know my father. Well at least not as a father anyway. He liked to shut his children in dark cellars.</p>
<p>My mother never really motivated me to study science; she fretted over my clothes, my meals, etc. but not my studies. I mean, she’s not a native speaker of English so when she wrote her papers, I often proofread her essays for her!</p>
<p>I’m sorry about your father, but it still doesn’t count. If you can, try to explain the situation to the program’s supervisors; it really should affect it since obviously you didn’t get the same benefit from your college-educated parents that someone who had one or both parents go to college long before they were born and were raised by that parent would, but you still have two parents in the house with college degrees and you are still apparently living with someone who went through the rigamarole very recently.</p>
<p>actually I was thinking of basing my personal statement around some of it. I’m applying to bio and chem internships. I was thinking how I could write how my father’s pedigree is kind of mysterious because I don’t know if his family’s diaspora ancestry goes all the way back to the traders who would sail from China during the Ming Dynasty or whether his family came to KL after WWI, or maybe there is some Peranakan blood, and connect it to my fascination with human migration. I have a strong interest in reconstructing the origins of the Han Chinese people through linguistic and genetic evidence.</p>
<p>Then connect it to my personal interest of course, because my father has many strange traits that I seem to have inherited, both good and bad. Let’s say my father is kinda psycho, so I always have to deal with the idea that I inherited some of his inner demons. And the rest of the family who I have met before was kinda strange too. I mean, the cycle of abuse apparently goes up for quite a bit – his parents abused him (I think it was from my paternal grandmother). So I end up wondering how much of my “bad” personality traits are environmentally-induced versus genetically-induced. </p>
<p>I have a strong interest in gene therapy because a) I am a transhumanist b) I personally want to eventually “weed out” the malicious personality genotypes I inherited. </p>
<p>Of course now I’m trying to figure out how to word it as maybe the sentence “I’m scared that I’ll end up abusing my own children” will scare my potential employers off.</p>