2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Campus tours, admitted student visit days, and open houses are well drilled parts of university recruitment efforts. At the same time, they are resources that not all students – prospective or accepted – can afford. Many students cannot give up the time or money required to travel to and attend on-campus events. Online alternatives have become more and more popular but cannot replicate the experience of actually stepping foot on campus and interacting with the community directly. When forming their initial perceptions of the institution they would spend several years living, learning, and participating in, students rely on the information and experiences provided to them by the university and their social networks. Given that these perceptions are what will eventually inform a student’s decision on where to enroll, making sure that the students have as much information as possible is paramount so that they can make an informed decision of the environment that will best suit them. There are a wide variety of factors that influence students’ access to and use of this information which will be explored in this paper, but one overarching dichotomy under examination is whether students were able to step foot on campus before making their enrollment decision or not. This information and the accompanying pre-college experiences inform the degree to which students feel like they belong on campus, setting the starting point for their collegiate career. This sense of belonging will further develop over the tenure of their undergraduate studies, but understanding its starting point is a valuable tool in identifying how to help students who feel out of place or ostracized.
The purpose of this qualitative investigation is to compare the anticipatory socialization experiences of eight students and understand how the experiences differed between those who were able to make it to campus prior to enrolling and those who were not, to better understand how it influenced their sense of belonging on campus. The data for this study are a collection of semi-structured interviews with eight students spanning chemistry, chemical engineering, and biochemistry at a large public Mid-Atlantic university. While the dataset contains thirty-two interviews – one each year for four years across eight participants – the bulk of the discussion of pre-college experiences occurred in the first- and second-year interviews. As noted above, a better understanding of how students pre-emptively form their picture of the university environment and how they fit into it would allow for better design and implementation of support and interventions for students who are struggling to adjust. Addressing the challenges that students face early on can help boost retention and the quality of students’ overall experience in the long term.