About the Project

My name is Vy and I attended Stanford as a FLI student from 2013-2017. I am now in the Oral History MA program at Columbia University and started this project as part of my work in the program. When I was at Stanford, I first found community with the First-Generation and/or Low-Income Partnership (FLIP) student group and was involved on FLIP Core throughout my years at Stanford. After graduating, I found myself continuing to think about how class, money, and privilege play out in my life, and I was curious about how other Stanford FLI alumni feel when they think about how Stanford has shaped their trajectories. 

Oral history felt like the right approach for learning about and documenting the stories of Stanford FLI alumni. To be brief, oral history is the practice of recording interviews with people about their experiences in the past. The oral history interview is different from what we may imagine of an “interview” that we see on TV or hear on the radio:

• The person being interviewed (the narrator) has more control over the interview – how it is structured and what it is about. Oral history interviewers ask open-ended questions, and give the narrator a lot of time and space to talk about whatever they want. We know that both the interviewer and narrator will have things they want to talk about, and believe that both people’s agendas are important. 
• The interviews are often long. They often are recorded in several sessions, and each session typically is 1-2 hours long.

Essentially, I thought that the expansive and flexible nature of oral history would allow for Stanford FLI alumni to reflect on their experiences more freely than the other ways in which they may have been asked to tell their stories in the past. 

One of the narrators of the project talked about how “you don’t really think about identity unless you think about yourself in the context of others,” because to think of identity means there’s something different about you. The narrators in this project reflected on the ways that they navigated/continue to navigate through their differences to a place like Stanford. I hope their reflections offer something to you and help to spark your own rememberings.

I am very thankful to all the narrators who have shared their time and stories with me for this project.

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Participate in the Project

If you are a Stanford FLI alum and are interested in learning more about the project/participating as a narrator, please let me know by filling out the form below. I am still looking to interview more alumni as this project continues onto its next phase.

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