- Certain traditions, you know,
the cohort meetings, the retreats, the dinners,
the certain things that we do together that--
If those didn't exist,
the community could easily fall apart
because students are busy.
But then, there's a central space
which is the First Wave family.
And it becomes tight-knit because those students come in
and become intimate with each other in the summer
before they even engage
with the rest of campus community.
- First Wave lineages were started in the first cohort.
Or after the first cohort.
It was originally fifteen people in the first cohort, I believe,
and fifteen in the second cohort.
So what they wanted was a mentorship program
which essentially what the lineages are.
You have someone from first cohort
who has a mentee from second cohort.
- A lot of First Wave students refer to their cohort members
as, like, their brothers and sisters, or their siblings.
And First Wave students referred to their mentors
as their parents.
- That student is my grandmother.
That student is, you know, my, my, my great-grandmother.
You know.
- Your great-gran, your great, great-gran,
your great, great, great-gran, and so on and so forth.
And so, it's really involved.
- Originally, it was like,
"This is how you survive this city."
Again, a lot of the people that First Wave recruited
are low-income students.
First time really being in this type of environment.
So the mentorship program was like,
"I made it through my freshman year
and here's how you can too."
And then, eventually evolves into this huge community.
By the time I came in eighth cohort,
there were many people who I just didn't know.
And there were a lot of people who I wanted to know.
And my lineage--
I end up meeting everyone in my lineage,
and really felt like,
"Wow, I have a community here."
One of the first people that I really got close with
was a woman named Barbara Gonzalez from the fifth cohort.
She's from New York and she, like, would take me in,
and just, like, order pizza, and we just watch movies.
And she was like, "You're in my lineage
so I can do this, you know."
But that was a community that I needed.
- My lineage, in particular, doesn't pass anything down,
but the program in itself passes down
something that started with Danez Smith in the first cohort.
I don't know if I can share what it is.
It's a it's a pair of underwear.
You aren't supposed to wear them.
Don't wear them. No one wears them.
But they.
They actually were never worn,
at least not to my knowledge, by the original wearer of them.
They were just really cool-looking underwear.
And then, like, every odd-number of cohorts,
someone in that cohort
gets handed, like, gets passed down the underwear,
if you are like are worthy.
There's no, like, it--
Like, the requirements, the eligibility for the underwear
are, like, completely arbitrary.
It depends on who has them at the time
and some people feel like they should be passed down
to, like, who they believe is, like, the most promising artist
of the next cohort
or who they have the strongest connection with
or who they think will be, like,
the strongest leader in the cohort.
So, it all depends.
I got the drawers, as a member of the fifth cohort
and then, I gave them to E.J. of the seventh cohort.
And then, oh, I want to say
Francisco Velasquez in the ninth cohort has them
and he will now pass them on to someone in the 11th cohort
and you pass them down at the retreat.
At the First Wave retreat in February.
So, yeah... [laughs]