Students Find—and Provide—Inspiration in Professor Pruitt’s First Gen Seminar

By Carla Meyer 

In Professor Lisa R. Pruitt’s The First Gen Experience in Scholarly and Popular Literature seminar, the personal takes precedence.

Coursework includes former White House aide Alejandra Campoverdi’s 2023 book First Gen: A Memoir, along with excerpts from such famous former first-generation law students as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President J.D. Vance. 

The life story-as-case study theme extends to the seminar students’ own odds-defying first-gen experiences, which they weave into class discussions or writings that range from blog posts to 20-page papers drafted to meet the law school’s writing requirement. 

“They are invited to tell their stories, and to see them as a source of power,” said Pruitt, herself a first-gen college graduate. But that invitation comes with a caveat: Students are free to divulge as much as or little as they want about themselves, since, as Pruitt points out, “it can be very triggering for people if they are not ready to dredge up this stuff.”  

Levels of disclosure naturally have varied over the years, said Pruitt, who first offered the seminar to UC Davis undergrads in 2018, before moving it to the law school.  

But “everybody was in a big 'share' mindset” when she taught the seminar in spring 2025, Pruitt said. “They shared extraordinarily revealing, thoughtful, and mature reflections on their experiences, whether growing up, in high school, undergrad, or law school.” 

Students addressed such topics as the emotional burden and loneliness of being considered the “strong” or “most capable” one in the family; how childhood family dynamics might shape later “attachment styles” with romantic partners; and the choice—informed partly in response to cultural and gender-based misperceptions—to maintain a bit of distance from one’s law school classmates. 

Some students incorporated personal anecdotes into broader theories. One blog post successfully segued from praising a world-building video game and the sense of personal empowerment it brought to warning of the perils of extreme power (referencing Hillbilly Elegy author Vance’s trajectory from first-gen law student to VP along the way). 

At semester’s end, students gathered on the stairwell inside King Hall for a group photo later posted on social media. In sharing the post, student Supreet Sandhu ’25 observed that the seminar had been “part storytelling, part soul searching, and somehow still law school.” 

Pruitt has embraced what she calls a “resurgence” of the first-gen designation within the University of California in recent years. Along with teaching the seminar, she serves as a faculty mentor with King Hall’s First Generation Advocates Program and co-authored a 2024 Alabama Law Review article (with Nirav Bhardwaj ’23) on teaching first-gen students. 

“First generation” is “an important frame because it is very inclusive,” Pruitt said. 

When she initially taught a version of the seminar to undergrads, Pruitt was floored by students’ willingness to share what they had overcome, whether it was a parent’s deportation or a history of family addictions. 

“I don’t want to sound too sentimental, or too melodramatic, but as a teacher, it was kind of life-changing,” she said. “It told me that students really wanted to be seen in all their complexity.”   

Although her experiences growing up in rural Arkansas are distinct from her students’ in many ways, tangible connections have emerged over the years. Pruitt’s father was a long-haul truck driver, like the fathers of Punjabi American seminar students who grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Familiar threads run through most first-gen stories, Pruitt noted. 

For instance, Michelle Obama’s recollection, in her 2018 memoir Becoming, of a high school guidance counselor once questioning whether she was “Princeton material” has sparked several students’ memories of being told by their counselors that they were “not UC material,” Pruitt said.

Such (hopefully long-retired) educational professionals no doubt perpetuated the “impostor phenomenon”—the non-reality-based, internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud—that remains common among first-gen students. 

Paula Rebelo ’22 wrote her 20-page paper on impostor phenomenon when she took Pruitt’s seminar in 2021. Now in-house counsel for a Silicon Valley cyber-security company, Rebelo addressed the same topic as a guest speaker in Pruitt’s seminar last spring. 

“I want to be a face of someone who has gone through it, to say, ‘I understand some of your feelings and your thoughts,’” Rebelo said of speaking to current students. 

Pruitt’s seminar had helped Rebelo feel connected to King Hall while taking most classes, including the seminar, remotely because of the pandemic. 

“The sense of community that we had in her class was really, really awesome,” Rebelo said. She and other students from her seminar “still reach out and text each other,” she said. 

It’s precisely the kind of outcome Pruitt hopes for, as a first-gen college grad, professor, and highly engaged member of the King Hall and larger campus community. 

“One of my goals has always been, ‘Let’s find our common ground,’” Pruitt said.