University to Work Transition in First Generation Students. Narrating Biographical Transitions in Digital Diaries

From the 1980s onwards, Chile has had an accelerated growth in higher education enrollment. The massification of higher education has made possible the emergence of new student profiles, increasing the socioeconomic diversity of the system as a whole. Working class students, students who will be the first professionals in their families, students who enter through inclusion programs or with free tuition law, represent today the so-called "new middle groups". Based on digital diaries, in this project I try to identify and analyze the moral repertoires and meanings related to the managing of transition to work and entry into professional life of first-generation students. Digital diaries are records in various formats, mainly audio, videos and photos, made by research participants about their experiences, allowing the description of 'in situ' experiences, context specificity and longitudinality (Volpe 2019; Jarrahi et.al., 2021). As part of my doctoral thesis, I work with 10 digital diaries created on whatsapp, where participants describe on a weekly basis their processes of adaptation to employment through text, audios, memes, stickers and photos. This platform allows them to narrate themselves in the moment of transition to work, as a way to produce meaning and represent their experiences by combining text and images. This kind of digital “biographical collage” works as a space for an autoethnographic exercise to record everyday descriptions, events, milestones, encounters, affections and environments of the general transition to work as an enactment of the lived experience and meanings in the process of its virtual depiction. The objective of this presentation is to review the advantages and challenges of working with digital diaries in the study of biographical transitions.