Being a first-generation student from a small rural town, I made it abroad without the networks, the financial guidance, or the family knowledge that many of my peers had. I watched classmates with similar or identical academic records receive full scholarship funding while I face student debt I will likely be carrying for years. That inequality is real, and it is painful, and it is a large part of why I am so committed to making study abroad more accessible for students like me — students who did not grow up knowing the world was available to them. My advocacy for access does not come from a theoretical place. It comes from lived experience, from roadblocks and workarounds and the desperate wish that someone had told me earlier what was possible.