First generation students

I recently ran a poll on Twitter asking if people are first generation academics, or if they come from a more privileged background. The results are interesting, with the majority of votes coming from first generation students.

I certainly come from a privileged background, and if you put my last name in Scopus you will find my grandfather, my father, and myself. Even though I come from such a privileged background, and I grew up in an environment where going to university was the obvious choice, I don’t feel like the love for research was passed on to me from my family. My grandfather passed away more than a decade before I was born, and my father had alzheimer’s disease when I was at university – I never got to talk to him about the joys of doing research. But I do remember him sitting on the beach during our holidays, while flipping through the British Journal of Urology and the American Journal of Urology. At that time I couldn’t believe one can read such boring things on the beach…

Here’s the wake of the poll: