Situation

First in your family to go to university — should you, and what's it like?

Nobody at home has done this. Your parents want to help and can't, or don't see the point, or see the point so strongly it is its own kind of pressure. The school has a leaflet. The university has a web page with a smiling student on it. Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people a year start university in the UK as the first in their family to do so, and most of them work it out as they go.

The guidance is good on applications, finance and accommodation. It is thin on the things that actually trip people up: not knowing what a seminar is for, not knowing that everyone else is also pretending, not knowing whether to go home every weekend, not knowing whether the course you picked at seventeen is the one you should finish.

What people ask

• First in my family to go to university — what is it actually like?
• My parents didn't go to university. Who do I ask about choosing a course?
• Should I go at all, if nobody in my family has?
• What did nobody warn you about in the first term?
• Did you feel like you didn't belong, and did it pass?
• Is it harder to drop out when you're the first to go?

What no search can return

Most universities will let you chat to a current student through a widget on their website, which is useful for the questions about that university. What is almost impossible to find is someone who was first in their family, finished, and can tell you three years later what mattered and what didn't — or someone who left, and whether they regret it.

Where the people who have been through it gather

• Every English university's widening-participation office, which holds the list of the people it supported.
• The Sutton Trust and The Brilliant Club, whose alumni are precisely these people.
• The 93% Club, a network of state-educated students and graduates.
• The Student Room, where the question is asked most weeks and answered by people a year ahead.

Open questions in this situation

Questions nobody has answered yet, kept here so that they can at least be found.

• You were the first in your family at university. What did nobody warn you about?
• Does it matter that your parents can't help you choose a course?

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