First-Gen Travel Project

The Unnamed First-Gen Travel Project

by: Corey Stone

My Roots

I grew up in a rural area of East Texas, spending most of my Saturday mornings as a kid doing work on the farm with my dad or hopping from pond to pond with our fishing poles. There are many assumptions that are often made about the lives and perspectives of rural Americans, but I was fortunate to have these meaningful experiences that made me who I am, while on my computer, and later my phone, I was always drawn to dream about this bigger world that existed beyond the tall pine trees of my youth.

To Parts Unknown

Sometime after I graduated from college, I began following the work of the late Anthony Bourdain, chef turned travel host. I was always struck by his authenticity, his earnestness, and his curiosity. He was kind and respectful, but he was always very much himself while abroad. He approached life like he approached food: with an eager openness to new experiences and the friendships that are built along the way. Whether Bourdain was in Thailand, Mississippi, or Bordeaux, he approached his travels with an appreciation for the “now,” while also seeking to understand the roots and aspirations of the people and places he visited.

Inspiring this Project

I try to be an introspective and reflective person, and a number of sources of inspiration have led me to this project. First, my maternal grandparents, who have been models of hospitality, kindness, and curiosity in my life, took me and my sister on numerous simple but memorable adventures as kids. On into college, we developed this family tradition where they found some place within driving distance from Texas, and from there memories were made. They showed me that travel doesn’t need to be extravagant to be meaningful and that all places offer us stories and histories to learn from.

Second, my work at my alma mater, Texas A&M University, led me into a career that I never expected, working in the college access and transition space, primarily with first-generation college students. I spent seven years in Aggieland after my undergraduate years, and I am truly blessed to be able to have made a career out of this wonderful and complex thing we call higher education. The son of a first-generation Aggie myself, I know the power that a college degree and the associated experiences can bring into one’s life, and I also know that the trajectory towards upwards mobility and greater opportunity, especially today, is not a linear path.

Lastly, I reference back to my aforementioned hero, flawed but nonetheless inspirational, Anthony Bourdain. My curiosity about the world is something that has long burned within me, but he demonstrated ways and places to express that curiosity in the world. One day, we will settle down and deepen our roots, but for now we are called to continue to seek out the far corners of our state, our country, and our world, and this project has allowed us to do this, while also enriching the lives of many fellow travelers.

Our Pillars

This project is built around the pillars of curiosity, community, accessibility, affordability, and flexibility. Curiosity drives us not only to always be thinking of the next adventure, but also, it’s what beckons us to continually push through long flights and sleepless nights to embrace the here and now and to understand these places we end up in. Community is a critical part of our model. In the most literal sense, our housing is typically communal, in some sense, but also the trips themselves are designed around the trajectory of the whole group, while also caring for individual needs along the way. Accessibility means that we welcome students from a variety of life paths, typically under the umbrella experience of being a first-generation college student or graduate, and we serve as collective guides along this journey together.

In order to ensure we are accessible, the trip is inherently designed to be affordable, both through communal cost-sharing, economically-considered travel options, and means of spreading out trip costs over a period of time. This is not a project designed around glamorous individualized excursions, although certainly trip participants have built off of our base model to further explore our destinations, but ultimately our program is about real access to this big, beautiful world around us. None of this works without a spirit of flexibility and understanding. Planning for these programs is rigorous, and it’s impossible to fully know everything that will occur in the course of travel, so a flexible spirit ensures that both economically and experientially the trip best serves all travelers.

From New York to Vancouver to Madrid to Tokyo, this project has taken us truly to parts unknown. For now, I close this reflection on our project with a quote from the aforementioned Anthony Bourdain:

“Travel isn't always pretty. It isn't always comfortable.

Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that's OK.

The journey changes you; it should change you.

It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body.

You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

Cheers — Corey & Liz Stone