2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work in Progress paper will describe the Transfer Student Summer Jump Start Program, which was designed to give engineering transfer students a soft landing into their life at a public university in a small college town. "Transfer Shock" is a known phenomenon where many transfer students experience a temporary dip in their grades during their first few terms at a four-year institution post transfer. Just as transfer students can take a myriad of academic paths, their reasons for experiencing the shock may come from multiple different factors: institutional, academic, and social.
• Institutional shocks – New transfer students face navigating a new institution with new processes (for enrollment, financial aid, housing, etc.). They must quickly identify new places to go for support to navigate the differences between systems.
• Academic – Once in classes, new transfer students face potential differences in pacing, expectations, and misalignment between tools, especially in an engineering context, such as common software tools, lab equipment, etc.
• Social – Many four-year schools can overly focus on helping First Time, First Year (FTFY) students create community, while leaving new transfer students to navigate a new social setting alone, often leaving them to enter a social environment where friendships are already established.

As a part of one of the largest and most diverse University systems, our primarily undergraduate institution has responded to a Statewide call to increase transfer pathways to provide students with expanded opportunities to earn an engineering degree. As an institution that is deeply rooted in hands-on learning, we have found that transfer students can face inequitable challenges in junior level courses due to limited hands-on lab experience at most community colleges. Another challenge for first year transfers students is the largely residential focus of our campus situated in a small college town. This creates tensions for new transfers in terms of logistics of finding housing and adjusting to the cultures of the local area. While our campus has been historically a primarily White institution, currently we are an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution with the transfer student population in the college of engineering comprised of a more ethnically diverse student body than the FTFY students. Providing support for students to increase their engineering skills and adjust to campus life has been a primary focus of the program.

To help ease the transition, the College of Engineering created the Summer Transfer Student Jump Start program to help orient and prepare new transfer students. This program, which has been running for three summers, brings small groups of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Computer Science (CS) students to campus for an early summer coursework experience. In the Summer of 2024, the program served 14 ME and 23 CS students on campus for a 5-week summer term before their first ‘normal’ Fall term. In this program, students enroll in an orientation course, major specific course(s), and participate in a weekly hour-long mentoring session. Led by instructional faculty who are passionate about supporting transfer students, this program focuses on providing transfer students with a supportive on-ramp into their engineering degree program.

The orientation course was designed to introduce students to campus resources and university life generally. Additionally, it helped to introduce the tools and system that will be used in future major specific courses. For example, in CS most community college introductory courses are either in Java or C++, here they are in Python. For ME, students were introduced to design thinking, the primary method used in the mechanical engineering design process so they can be prepared to jump into third year design courses. The major specific course gives students a focused time to adjust to the style of major course at our institution and takes care of one core requirement for their degree in a course not offered at community colleges.

The program’s mentoring sessions were designed to help with general life and existence on campus. Each week’s session had a particular theme: Meet the Chair, This Small Town Life, Got Help?, Club Kid, and We are Family. The sessions were designed to address the three major sets of issues as above, including forming a cohort of students to support each other and hopefully to serve as ambassadors to the incoming transfer students that were not able to participate. Entry and exit surveys show the program has been broadly successful. Informally, the participants are taking many courses together in their first term, are seen on campus walking to/from classes together as a cohort and are often seen studying together in department spaces.