Paper: Overcoming Comfort Zones to Better the Self-Efficacy of Undergraduate Engineering Students (Tricks of the Trade) (WIP)

Across the country, community colleges take interventional measures to eliminate factors that thwart the retention, engagement, and success of their respective students. Among the most debilitating of these factors is the lack of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as the confidence an individual has in their ability to achieve an objective effectively. Considering that low self-efficacy is attributed to a variety of reasons, there is no standard practice to eliminate this issue for every student. A combination of approaches is used concurrently by programs in order to address common causes including diversity exclusion and gender inequality. Community college engineering programs across the country attempt to increase student success through different interventions. However, academically exceptional students often fail to delve into co-curricular activities, especially at the community colleges. Community colleges are often commuter schools and students do not feel the need to get involved with co-curricular activities. Oftentimes, students are apprehensive about appending extracurriculars to their workload with the belief that this may negatively affect their performance to an unknown degree. Although it has been shown that participation in co-curricular activities will increase confidence, leadership and belonging that will increase classroom performance, community college students opt to stay within a comfort zone of their current, solely academic workload and give up vital opportunities to develop professionally. We hypothesize that increased participation in co-curricular activities will increase self-efficacy and will improve academic performance. In this paper, we will correlate co-curricular participation to success. Utilizing personal experiences of ABC engineering students and alumni, this paper will shed light on the comfort zone dilemma and supports the concept of a compounding reward-system as means to increase the self-efficacy of undergraduate engineering students by repeatedly overcoming their comfort zones. The concept of a compounding reward system will be validated by correlating individual students' grade point averages (GPA) and course workloads to overall time commitments and co-curricular activities per semester. Student participation will also be correlated with time to degree completion at the community college. We will use a survey and case study interviews to assess self-efficacy in relation to community college engineering students' participation. By correlating student involvement with GPA and time to degree completion we will determine the role of the reward system in increasing student self-efficacy and, thus, student success.