This dissertation research explored the ways that first-generation and non-first-generation college students saw themselves, their histories, and their futures as they adapted to life at an academically demanding and historically established college. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 students whose backgrounds varied in terms of whether or not they were the first in their family to go to college as well as in terms of their racial and ethnic heritage. In these interviews, processes of change and continuity in the students' lives were discussed.

Data analysis relied on a grounded theory approach. This report includes an examination of orientational metaphors that emerged from the data and that clearly structured the students' academic and social experiences at college. In addition, case studies of six students with different heritages and different academic and social experiences of college highlight the orientational metaphors and narrative tools that form the inner workings—that is, the being, doing, and storying—of the negotiation of college life. These processes show us how Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of habitus, cultural capital, and field might operate in everyday thinking and social relations.

Over the course of the project, expectations that students would adhere to either a future-oriented or an exploratory approach to their studies were proved incorrect. The findings trace connections that existed among students of different backgrounds due to their participation in certain narratives, and in particular through their participation in the narrative debate of practicality versus exploration as the purpose of college.

This research advances the discussion of the ways that family history and higher education come together by showing that the families of first-generation and non-first-generation students provided support at different stages in their children's college-bound and college-attending activities. In the accounts of students who talked about feeling like outsiders, marginality was found to be an elastic and situational experience that could sometimes have positive effects. By showing how adaptation involved not only maintaining equilibrium, but also, for some students, involved shifting the point of equilibrium, this research describes the profound changes in outlook that go hand-in-hand with changes in life trajectory.