The Accidental College Student

This narrative study began as a retrospective of an in-depth interview study with a young woman who navigated the move from a large, suburban school system in the mid-Atlantic region before the fifth grade to a small, isolated rural school in Southern Appalachia in the 1990s. She graduated from the only high school serving the county in which she lived. Over the course of two formal interviews, hundreds of informal conversations for more than ten years, and particularly through writing this analysis (Goodall, 2000), I realized that even though there were vast differences between our ages, cultural backgrounds, and current lives, we walked in tandem through similar experiences along the convoluted path to college; even if at different times and locations. The purpose of this thesis is to represent both my production of her story and mine in order to share the experiences of two female first-generation non-traditional college students (page 71).

Lyndy,

Final version.

Phyliss