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Transitioning from childhood to adulthood for young people is a process that neither happens by accident nor does it happen on its own. It is a process that requires tools to manage it (Maja, 2022) and processes to ensure its success (Appadurai, 2004). In this chapter, I shall demonstrate that inborn traits (Appadurai, 2004) are an insufficient predictor of future success for young people. I will demonstrate that tools and processes, spearheaded by parents, are more powerful predictors of young people’s future success, even though both tools and processes are not equally distributed (Bok, 2010) amongst our young. Parental guidance and involvement is central in both activating these tools and processes, and managing them. I shall be using young people’s artefacts and their narratives of own aspirations – both virtual and physical – to elucidate my proposition further.

The purpose of this article is to analyse first-generation Chilean students' transition experiences from secondary school to university.

This article presents the analysis results of 12 visual narratives of first-generation Chilean university students, who provided an account of their transition experience from secondary school to university. Participants explored the connections between their most valuable learning experiences during photo-elicitation interviews. The study used Quinn's notion of imagined social capital to understand the transition experience.

The analysis reveals the significance of secondary school experiences in understanding students' attitudes toward the university. In an extremely segregated school system, participants' secondary school experiences demonstrated a strong bond with classmates from their social class and a feeling of distance from institutions and their hierarchical structure. In this context, the university space is symbolically recreated into a learning space consistent with their social background.

The research study highlights the need to increase understandings of school experiences and how these shape university transitions in order to effectively support students during the first years of university. In addition, it draws attention to the need to develop strategies that recognize the complex, collective and contextualized understandings of students' transition.

The research aimed to understand the experience of transition of first generation students from their own narratives and relational perspectives in contrast with the prevailing paradigms which are often individualized and linear.

This chapter honors the opportunity I have had to learn with David Maines over the past 35 years. I connect my research on communication and disability, specifically among individuals who are blind and visually impaired, to Maines' discussion of narratives incorporating Rawlins' exploration of similarity and difference. I discuss narratives of disability as difference using three examples: A short story written by H. G. Wells; the American with Disabilities Act; and interviews conducted with elite blind goalball athletes. I conclude with 10 lessons learned about disability and difference including that the goal of my research is to help us all perceive disability as a difference that matters, but not as a difference that disables.

David R. Maines was a founder of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, a fierce defender and practitioner of interactionist sociology, and cross-disciplinary pioneer, bridging sociology and communication research in the study of narrative. He invariably gathered collaborative circles of colleagues and students around him wherever his intellectual travels took him. Here, I recall the collaborative circle that formed with him at its center at Penn State in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a time of both personal and professional turmoil for David, and also prolific scholarly achievement. I then introduce other contributions to this volume that feature others' remembrances and appreciations of David's life and work.

This letter to David R. Maines celebrates our friendship over the last 35 years. I read his voice in emails, handwritten letters, and recollected phone conversations to display the meaningful exchanges of our scholarly friendship. I thank Dave for teaching me how to retire from the academy and grow older with purpose and grace. Highlighting his expert mentoring of my book Friendship Matters (1992), I recall how his suggested revisions for the chapters on aging anticipated a poignant array of our own experiences as friends in our later years. Finally, I appreciate his cultivated interests in drawing, writing poetry, and playing guitar, and thank him for encouraging my music. I am grateful for his dedication to esthetic endeavors, which warmly shaped our friendship during our later years.