Multidisciplinary and Dual University Undergraduate Research Opportunities: A Low Stakes/High Impact Practice that Engages Underrepresented Populations in Engineering

Engineering students are inundated with high-stakes scenarios like exams and projects saturated with expectations of excellence.Students rarely are granted an opportunity to escape these expectations and design, develop, and build a project lead predominately by their peers.We have taken an opportunity to challenge these traditional expectations and offer a multidisciplinary research experience spanning two universities addressing survivability during extreme weather.The group of students on this project span multiple critical identities, many of which underrepresented in engineering.This work will qualitatively examine the experiences of those students and how it has impacted their time as undergraduate engineering students.