2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this interactive poster is to provide, analyze, and contrast the demography and experience of first-year engineering transfer students within the college and teaching intensive university sector compared to direct entry engineering students at a medium-sized comprehensive research university offering undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees.

In earlier work, the development of a survey instrument aimed to broadly capture the engineering student experience from entry to first-year through graduation was described. Here, defined and open-ended survey questions - coded as addressing autonomy, competency, or relatedness to align with the self-determination theory (SDT) framework - provided a broader contextualization of student experience than typically is captured. This preliminary work suggested student engagement with the survey may diminish with time spent responding to questions and/or the question content (e.g. when asked about gender identity or sexual orientation). The results supported other research that suggested student experience is impacted by their identity.

In the present work, the usage of the survey instrument has been expanded to capture first-year engineering transfer programs at several colleges and teaching intensive universities within the British Columbia transfer system. Their responses are contrasted with direct entry students within the Schools of Engineering Science, Mechatronics Systems Engineering, and Sustainable Energy Engineering at Simon Fraser University, a receiving partner for these transfer programs. The results articulate the differences and similarities between the demographics and experience of each cohort, identify transfer barriers and suggest enhancement opportunities, and support work to develop resources for engineering programs that enhance equity, allyship, and representation.