ENGAGE: Co-curricular Engagement for Transfer Students

Students from two-year community colleges face many barriers when transferring to four-year universities. One barrier in particular for transfer students is their integration into campus in curricular and co-curricular activities. Universities spend a lot of effort easing this transition for first-time freshman, but typically much less for two-year community college transfer students. This discrepancy is worrisome as it is widely believed that extra-curricular activities help increase students’ sense of belonging and that co-curricular activities develop students’ identity as an engineer. This paper is a work-in-progress that describes research on transfer student’s participation in extra and co-curricular activities. In this paper, we describe our current and future plans for study with hopes of soliciting feedback from the engineering education community. This research is part of an NSF funded transfer-student success program that provides scholarships and strength-based training and mentoring to transfer students over two years at a community college and two years at a four-year engineering university. Our initial research found that transfer students at this four-year engineering university are less likely to participate in co-curricular activities and if they do participate, they spend less time on co-curricular activities. This highlights the importance of understanding why transfer students do and don’t participate in extra- and co-curricular activities so we can minimize institutional barriers and maximize student participation in these activities. Our plan is to quantify how and how much transfer students participate in extra- and co-curricular activities, describe the impact participation has on their sense of belonging and the development of their engineering identity, and to identify any institutional barriers and institutional supports that can support student involvement in co-curricular activities.