Students who are the first-generation in their family to attend college are increasingly the spotlight of educational research and reform seeking to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in higher education in general and engineering in particular. While growing research begins to illuminate the challenges these college students face, this research project attempts to break new grounds by taking an asset-based approach to understanding how first gen students' backgrounds help them succeed in engineering. We conducted both a focused ethnographic analysis and a large-scale national survey. Our work points to the significance of first gen engineering students' funds of knowledge