2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Helping Undergraduates Find a Research Match Yields Stellar Retention Results

This evidence-based practice paper will detail how matching first- and second-year students with research faculty has not only produced outstanding results in terms of student engagement and desire to pursue an engineering degree but has also shown sustained improvements in retention of five to seven percent.

Institutions of higher education have received increasing criticism for attracting students to campus, only to leave many students feeling they don’t belong and looking for the exit shortly after arriving. Many factors contribute to a student’s sense of belonging – their professors and TAs, their living situation, their classmates, finding “their people”, finding comfort foods that remind them of home, to name a few. Students also want to feel they have arrived at an institution that will meet their expectations; expectations that were set over the preceding months and years by campus visits, friends, family, websites, and advertisements. At an R1 university, one of those expectations may be the opportunity to participate in research that is educational, engaging, and most important, exciting. R1 universities have the unique opportunity to both meet this expectation and help solidify that all important feeling of belonging for students, simply by engaging them in research in their first or second year. But how simple is it really?

This paper will detail the experience of one R1 institution’s experience implementing a first- and second-year research program over the last five years. While this program has been a huge win for the students, helping them feel a sense of belonging and a sense they have come to an institution that meets their expectations and didn’t just sell them a bill of goods, it has also been extremely beneficial to the research faculty. While students have a strong desire to participate in research and see real applications of engineering principals, research faculty/PIs also have high need for additional people to help them perform their critical research. One major issue: helping these eager students and talented research faculty find each other. By putting a program in place to facilitate this matching, both students and faculty are able to meet their goals, engaging students in meaningful research and assisting research faculty in meeting their research goals.

All of this may sound wonderful, but at the end of the day, such a program needs to produce tangible, measurable, and sustained results to be worthwhile. While many colleges and universities set goals in hopes of raising retention rates by a percentage point, this research program has raised retention in engineering by a little over five percent, and retention at the institution by seven percent. These results have been consistently achieved over a period of five years. In addition, students participating in this research program feel more connected to the college of engineering, are better able to see themselves as an engineer, and are more likely to reach out to their faculty mentor for help in the future. While many of the students engaged in the program may not go on to do research after graduation, their experience in this research program makes them more likely to stay in engineering and earn a degree that will greatly benefit them in the future.