Since I became a father three months ago, I cannot stop noticing everything my daughter will inherit simply because of where I am today, as a first-generation college graduate who now sits in rooms my parents never did. She will inherit relationships and people who can help her make sense of the world. She will grow up believing higher education is an expectation. She will know what a resume is. She will be confident enough to ask for help. She’ll know that internships matter and how to ask for letters of recommendation. She’ll understand that careers don’t simply happen.

None of that feels extraordinary to me anymore. It feels normal. But it didn’t used to, and for many talented young people, it still doesn’t.

During high school, I applied to the University of Iowa without ever visiting because most of what I knew about college came from movies. I wanted that picture: a big campus, far from home, nothing like where I came from. Driving out, watching the buildings thin into farmland, it hit me how far I was going.

By the second week, the challenge set in. In class, the professor referenced books my classmates had all read in high school. They could relate. I could not. There were dozens of moments like that, where I realized I was missing things other students already had. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I was starting to understand that the things I’d thought of as normal weren’t the norm for the people around me.

Then I met a mentor who changed my trajectory. Nancy Humbles, director of the university’s Center for Diversity and Enrichment at the time, made me aware of what I now think of as the second curriculum: the unwritten lessons that would shape my time in college and everything after. At the start of my sophomore year, she asked what I was doing that summer. I hadn’t thought about it; I figured I’d go home and work. She said, absolutely not, you need an internship. I didn’t really know what that was. So she sat me down and walked me through it, including the part nobody tells you: that you apply for the competitive ones in the fall, almost a year ahead.

She didn’t just answer my questions. She asked me the questions I didn’t know to ask. When you are the first in your family to go to college, that is what you are missing. Not intelligence, not drive. You simply do not know what you do not know.

Years later, I was the one at the front of the classroom, a first-year elementary school teacher on Chicago’s West Side, seeing my younger self in students who were capable, hardworking and lacking the exact things I had been missing.

Today I work at Braven, a national nonprofit embedded within colleges and universities that partners with employers to build career readiness into the undergraduate experience. Students take a credit-bearing course and work alongside a coach, a working professional who helps them learn the second curriculum I once had to piece together on my own. 

More than 17,400 students have come through the program. Within six months of finishing college, had landed a strong first job or started graduate school, a 12-point edge over comparable students nationally. They also complete internships at rates 28 points above their peers. 

But a single program, however good, can’t be the whole answer. I still see students doing everything right, persisting, checking every box, who still don’t have the team around them that makes the difference.

Here is what I wish someone had told me earlier: Most of the rules that govern colleges and workplaces were made up by regular people. I used to treat those institutions with reverence until I got older, ended up in the rooms where decisions are made and realized the people there were ordinary, just like me. The systems that shape a life weren’t designed by geniuses. If ordinary people built them, ordinary people can rebuild them.

Too often, first-generation and low-income students are told that hard work is enough. But that message is incomplete. It assumes they already understand the rules of a game nobody has explained to them. The missing piece is someone willing to teach you that second curriculum, if you weren’t among the lucky few to inherit it.

I look at my daughter, and I am not worried about her. She will inherit that second curriculum without ever realizing it has a name. She’ll inherit people to call, expectations about college, confidence walking into unfamiliar rooms and the quiet assumption that she belongs there. What I am concerned about is how many young people who are just as capable will navigate without it.

Anyone can be a builder. It doesn’t take extraordinary genius to look at the future you want for other people’s children and start building it. It just takes deciding that the rules somebody else made up can be made again.