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Community college students who transfer to 4-year institutions for engineering degrees are known to face significant adversity. Some common challenges they face include having minimal financial resources, a lack of engineering-oriented mentorship, and prolonged time to degree. Engineering transfer students are naturally diverse, ranging in age, experience, and motivation. Some have carved paths that include, for example, military service, starting a family of their own, or switching their career aims. The nuanced nature of the transfer student experience challenges higher education professionals to identify innovative ways for transfer students to meet their individualized goals. The engineering transfer students aim to transition from a previous institution to a 4-year baccalaureate institution, obtain an engineering undergraduate or graduate degree, and, finally, transition into an engineering-oriented career. These are major transitions. Schlossberg has identified factors that influence an individual’s ability to cope with their experienced transitions, namely, situation, self, support, and strategies. Through this lens, the transfer experiences and transfer shocks undergone by these ambitious students may be better understood and improved. A partnership between a 4-year institution, the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and two community colleges, Imperial Valley College (IVC) and Southwestern College (SWC), has been formed to better understand and support transfer engineering students as they make major transitions in, through, and out of their respective institutions. Through this partnership, a supportive program called EMPOWER has been devised to assemble cohorts of Pell-grant-eligible engineering transfer students so that their diverse and timely needs can be addressed. Scholarships and high-impact practices have been offered to these students. Program activities include cross-campus visits, faculty, and alumni mentorship, financially supported research opportunities, and cohort-supporting social opportunities. Through focus groups and survey questionnaires, the transition experience for these students is further investigated. In this paper, an outline is provided detailing the common challenges faced by engineering transfer students as they transition toward their careers, along with high-impact practices to support them.
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Transfer-bound community college students’ biology identity and perception of teaching
Community colleges are frequently an affordable, accessible entrance to a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and career, but the transition from a 2-year program to a 4-year institution can be tumultuous. In this mixed-methods study, we explore the experiences of transfer and prospective transfer students. Through surveys and interviews, we identify the challenges faced by and the supports desired by biology transfer students. We describe how community college students perceive their introductory biology courses, and we compare the biology identity and self-efficacy of these students to peers at a 4-year institution. Students expressed uncertainty about what to expect from the transfer experience, and they benefitted from interventions that made the university experience more concrete or clarified their expectations. We found that community college students are just as interested in biology as peers at a 4-year university, but they are significantly less likely to believe that others recognize them as “biology people” and report less self-efficacy regarding biology courses. Students felt particularly well-prepared for transfer after community college biology courses they described as “rigorous” and “demanding,” especially because students expressed that the community college environment helped support them through the challenges of higher education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821909
- PAR ID:
- 10584886
- Editor(s):
- Parks, Samantha T
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society for Microbiology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1935-7877
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e00116-23
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00116-23
