STEP Bridge Program: Learning to Belong at UC Davis

The summer before I started my college journey at UC Davis, I was invited into the Special Transitional Education Program (STEP), a summer bridge program for first-generation, low-income students. I came in unsure of what to expect; I left with more than I could have asked for.

College courses, workshops, and a cohort of people like me, all of us trying to make sense of an environment and a system none of our families had navigated before.

Statistically, first-generation, low-income students drop out at much higher rates. According to the NCES, first-generation students are roughly twice as likely as their peers to leave within six years without earning a credential. Those rates aren't high because we're less capable; they're high because the system assumes a readiness and a base of knowledge nobody handed us. STEP handed it to us, and then some.

Coming from Nepal at a young age, I had always felt a step behind in every process, in ways I couldn't always name, because I didn't have the direction or expertise that so many others seemed to start with. For the first time in my life, I had a resource built to put me ahead, not just to keep me afloat.

I left STEP with more than academic readiness. I left with a mindset that still shows up everywhere, including this website: the willingness to be the first one in the room who doesn't know something, and to ask anyway; the habit of building the map myself when no one hands me one. It's the same instinct behind every project here. I learned not just to go with the flow, but to direct it.

STEP was only six weeks. The impact it left is something no other program could have given me, and I'm grateful for the opportunity I was handed.