“Any moment someone would realize and kick me out”: sense of deservingness in the socio-psychological lived experiences of first-generation graduate students

This study explores the lived experiences of first-generation graduate students in Israel, highlighting the socio-psychological complexities of academic identity formation. As the first in their families to pursue higher education at the graduate level, these students face intersecting social, cultural, and class-based challenges, often accompanied by feelings of alienation and partial belonging. Photovoice was employed as community-based participatory research. Thirteen students participated in 16 sessions, producing 156 visual-textual inputs analyzed through a poly-textual approach. Findings reveal five themes: confronting socio-economic and cultural gaps, challenging family traditions, Feeling Like a Guest in Academia: Questioning Deservingness, the softening of challenges over time, and intergenerational spaces of compensation. Across these themes, deservingness emerged as a central thread that organized socio-psychological struggles and strategies of belonging. This underscores how community-social identity among first-generation graduate students is shaped through tensions between exclusion and integration, while also reflecting their agency in claiming space.