2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Transfer engineering students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, face significant challenges during their transition to four-year institutions and throughout their academic journey. These challenges, including navigating academic support, finding mentors, and building self-efficacy, can negatively impact their academic success and sense of belonging. The EMPOWER Program, supported by the NSF S-STEM Program, is a collaboration between UC San Diego, Southwestern College, and Imperial Valley College and is developed to mitigate these challenges by offering scholarships, mentoring, networking, and research opportunities to low-income transfer engineering students. Grounded in Schlossberg’s Transition Theory, this exploratory study investigates the impact of participation and engagement in various social and academic support activities. Motivation–including self-efficacy, self-determination, intrinsic motivation, career motivation, and goal motivation–and sense of belonging are explored as they are impacted by the program and school activities. Additionally, the effects of the activities on transfer engineering student transitions are investigated and discussed.

Using a survey-based mixed-method approach, we collected information on students’ engagement with support activities, their transition experiences, the perceived impact of these activities, and their levels of motivation and sense of belonging. Our findings indicated no statistically significant differences in motivation and sense of belonging between students who participated in community-building, professional development, and academic support opportunities and those who did not. However, minor trends suggest that participation in these activities, particularly professional development and social events, might be linked to slightly higher intrinsic motivation and a sense of belonging. Notably, free-response data highlighted the pivotal role of friendships in supporting student transitions, with students attributing their positive experiences to networks formed through community-building events and friends transitioning from the same college.

Viewed through the lens of Schlossberg’s Transition Theory, the findings suggest that optional activities within scholarship programs are particularly valuable. Additionally, a major factor in transition is found to be how well students maintain or establish new friendships, and scholarship programs can play a key role in this process.