The Covid-19 pandemic has made the academic year 2020/2021 very different from other years. Many first-year students have only visited their university a few times. It follows that their integration into a new system was much more exacting than for those who began to study during previous years. Tinto (1975) theorizes that all newcomers integrate into two (academic and social) spheres of a university system. He defines integration into the academic sphere as the ability to become a student who has accepted a new social role and who knows how to study and successfully get through their term. Integration into the social system means making new connections, finding new friends, and living the "students' life", which also means becoming a student who knows his or her rights and duties and knows who to contact if she or he needs something connected to education. According to Vlk et al. (2017) and Dyson and Renk (2006), successful integration into the university system is crucial for future student study achievement. But the first semester of the academic year 2020/2021 was held online at most Czech universities. That negatively influenced the possibility of meeting new peers, teachers, and colleagues, leading to more difficult integration into the system. Current research focuses more on how pandemic affected lower educational levels, and they observe how the situation and distance education influences pupils' educational paths (for more, see Brom et al., 2020; Švaříček et al. 2020). We can also find research papers about integration in higher education background, but so far, no research has focused on integration into the university system during their pandemic online first semester. This research gap partially filled this paper. Except for the specific time and conditions of the first semester of the academic year 2020/2021 in the Czech Republic, this research focus on a specific group of students. This specific group of students are first-generation students who are more likely to drop out of tertiary education than their colleagues (Ives and Castillo-Montoya, 2020). We can identify several groups of students. One of them is a group of first-generation students. These are students whose parents and siblings do not have a degree from a tertiary educational institution. These students are more likely to drop out and have to overcome more obstacles than their colleagues who are not first-generation students (Vengřinová, 2021). Based on the research gap, the specific situation of social distance during the first semester of the academic year 2020/2021 and the specific group of students, the main research question is: How do first-generation students reflect and describe their effort to meet their peers and to accept their new role as students and become part of the academic community?

The purpose of the contribution is to investigate and understand the characteristics of the social integration of first-generation university students during their first semester at university, which was held in the distance mode (online). The partial goal is to describe the obstacles that enter the whole social integration process. A qualitative approach to data collection helped get a more in-depth insight into this concrete problem. During the exam period (January and February 2021) and the beginning of the spring semester, the first round of interviews was conducted with first-generation students whose study field is teacher training. I asked them about their first moments as university students and which obstacles they had to overcome due to the social integration during distance learning. The main research question How do first-generation students reflect and describe their effort to meet their peers and accept their new role as students, and become part of the academic community? (1) How did they find their peers? (2) What social media did they use to communicate with their peers? (3) How do they behave in the peer group? (4) What motivates and influences their behaviour in the peer group? Answers to these specific research questions get in-depth knowledge about the social integration influenced by specific conditions due to Covid-19 restrictions. After collecting all online (due to the pandemic situation) interviews and transcribing them, transcripts were uploaded in the Atlas.ti. In this software, I open coded data corpus airst to orientate the topic, then I categorised these codes and visualised them to ubetter understand their connections

One of the main findings of this contribution is that first-generation students were much motivated to start the phase of their lives. They all wanted a fresh start, which influenced their search for everything connected to university. They tried to pass the first semester even in conditions negatively impacted by the pandemic. Tinto (1975) says that it is necessary to integrate into both spheres of a university system and connect. It is even more visible for first-generation students. Their family members have no experience with the university system. Therefore they had to find someone else to help them. They found these people in the Facebook groups, and as most of them say, this saved their first days at university and helped them figure out how to overcome many obstacles. There were three possibilities, how they found their peers (1) creating a Facebook group for the students of the same field of study and inviting others; (2) finding already created a Facebook group and became a member or (3) someone invited them to the group. Inside of these groups, they acted differently. Based on the analysis, we can identify four types of group members ("team player", "observer", "searcher", "invisible"). The first three types of students somehow interact in the group, e.g. "team players" are active participants and help others with their academic integration. On the other hand, the "invisible" is only part of the group because of their status. They do not follow the group or read what is happening there, but they are part of it because they are university students, and this group is for university students. As Tinto (1975) says, academic integration must accept the new social role of students, which means they have different strategies to reach the same goal- becoming a successful university student.

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