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The Urban Review
Published in: The Urban Review 2/2023

10-11-2022

“Everything is Bigger and Different”: Black Engineering Transfer Students Adjusting to the Intensity and Academic Culture of the 4-Year Campus

Authors: Shannon Hayes Buenaflor, Bruk Berhane, Sharon Fries-Britt, Ashley Ogwo

Published in: The Urban Review | Issue 2/2023

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Abstract

Black engineering transfer students face unique challenges while navigating the transfer process from a community college to a 4-year institution. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the experiences of these students and the ways in which they adjust to the 4-year school. We identify specific challenges noted by Black engineering transfer students in their experiences related to: (1) heuristics of teaching and learning that they had to adapt to in order to successfully navigate new campus environments; (2) information gaps that students encountered in what faculty seemed to expect them to already know; and (3) problems in having to adjust to the differences in the academic demands of the 4-year engineering program. In addition to unpacking our findings along these specific domains, we attend to the potential impact of having these challenges in a large, urban, metropolitan area.
next article Yes, Teaching and Pedagogical Practices Matter: Graduate Students’ of Color Stories in Hybrid Higher Education/Student Affairs (HESA) Graduate Programs

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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
The terms community college, 2-year institution, baccalaureate-granting institution, and 4-year institution all appear in this paper. Terminology is a critical component of academic writing. Within the scope of this paper, we lean heavily on the terms 2-year and 4-year institutions to reflect the larger literature surrounding transfer student experiences as well as the language used by our participants throughout their interviews.
 
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Metadata
Title
“Everything is Bigger and Different”: Black Engineering Transfer Students Adjusting to the Intensity and Academic Culture of the 4-Year Campus
Authors
Shannon Hayes Buenaflor
Bruk Berhane
Sharon Fries-Britt
Ashley Ogwo
Publication date
10-11-2022
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
The Urban Review / Issue 2/2023
Print ISSN: 0042-0972
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1960
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-022-00644-3

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