Pride. Excitement. A desire to thrive. All qualities you’ll find in first-generation students — nearly one-third of currently enrolled Bruins.
But these incredible students face unique challenges on their path to graduation and life beyond — namely, that the people in their support network back home (if it even exists) often lack the firsthand experience to help the student navigate. When you are the first person in your family to ever go to college, the landscape can be especially intimidating.
“My parents have minimal education,” says Mayu Sasame, a fourth-year education and social transformation major. “Education was not the focus of my family. I learned the rule of preparation for the next stage the hard way.”
How best to help such students? Enter UCLA’s First-Gentorship program — a partnership between UCLA’s First To Go program and the Alumni Association’s Alumni Mentor Program — which helps students build mentoring relationships with alumni they feel can help guide them toward their personal, academic and professional goals. While First-Gentorship has been around for five years, this iteration of the program involving Alumni Affairs just launched in fall of 2025. It has seen the participation of 132 mentors and 175 mentees — more than triple the amount in the previous year.
“This partnership creates meaningful opportunities for mentorship, career exploration and industry connections,” says Carina Salazar '00, the executive director for Career and Immersive Experiences for UCLA Student Affairs, “while also strengthening alumni involvement and investment in first-generation Bruins.”
Here’s how it works: First-gen students have early access to alumni mentor profiles and are encouraged to select someone based on what matters most to them — shared interests, career pathways, identities or lived experiences. This can include alumni who were themselves first-gen students. For Mayu, who sought guidance for her graduate program application, relatability was key. She felt she “could be more open to someone who experienced similar struggles.”
To support this relationship-building, First-Gentorship hosts one or two social events per month, including gatherings like Vision Board socials and Alumni Mentor Program Networking Nights. First-Gen also offers an “Invite Your Mentor to Coffee” initiative, which provides mentees with meal vouchers to encourage informal, one-on-one meetings.
For mentors like David Stephens M.S. ’89, who spent 40 years in the space industry, the opportunity to make a positive difference is deeply meaningful. “I think I may have helped my mentee already,” he says, “by encouraging her to get involved in space-related organizations on campus, reviewing and updating her resume, providing advice for interviewing and recommending various employment opportunities.”
As mentor relationships deepen, their impact often extends beyond academic or career decisions. For Mayu, the guidance she received helped shape her long-term plans and her sense of purpose.
“This program helped me immensely to construct my future. I was able to take a gap year because of my mentor’s help, and it was one of the best decisions I made in my educational career,” says Mayu. “I plan to keep in contact with her even after my graduation, and it would be nice if I can become a Gentorship mentor in the future.
“Reciprocity,” she adds, “is very important to me.”
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Spring 2026 issue.
