“Everything is Bigger and Different”: Black Engineering Transfer Students Adjusting to the Intensity and Academic Culture of the 4-Year Campus
Article
Buenaflor, SH, Berhane, B, Fries-Britt, S et al. (2023). “Everything is Bigger and Different”: Black Engineering Transfer Students Adjusting to the Intensity and Academic Culture of the 4-Year Campus
. 55(2), 173-203. 10.1007/s11256-022-00644-3
Buenaflor, SH, Berhane, B, Fries-Britt, S et al. (2023). “Everything is Bigger and Different”: Black Engineering Transfer Students Adjusting to the Intensity and Academic Culture of the 4-Year Campus
. 55(2), 173-203. 10.1007/s11256-022-00644-3
Black engineering transfer students face unique challenges while navigating the transfer process from a community college to a 4-year institution. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the experiences of these students and the ways in which they adjust to the 4-year school. We identify specific challenges noted by Black engineering transfer students in their experiences related to: (1) heuristics of teaching and learning that they had to adapt to in order to successfully navigate new campus environments; (2) information gaps that students encountered in what faculty seemed to expect them to already know; and (3) problems in having to adjust to the differences in the academic demands of the 4-year engineering program. In addition to unpacking our findings along these specific domains, we attend to the potential impact of having these challenges in a large, urban, metropolitan area.
