How Underrepresented Minority Engineering Students Derive a Sense of Belonging from Engineering

While feeling overwhelmed by the workload, pace and conceptual difficulties can be a common experience among undergraduate engineering students, ethnic minority engineering students often face additional challenges in their undergraduate programs, which can make them feel isolated and hinder their ability to integrate into their college campuses. Integration into the college environment plays an important role in students feeling a sense of belonging on campus, and ultimately in their decisions to persist. Racial and ethnic minority students who are integrated into the college environment through various means can find supports such as friends with similar backgrounds, advice from advanced students, and role models and advisors, which can positively influence academic performance. This paper identifies four main areas which under-represented minority students in engineering described as helpful to their development of a sense of community and belonging: co-curricular/extracurricular involvement, peer support, faculty and department support, and residence programs. The study demonstrates that underrepresented minority engineering students were able to derive a sense of integration, community and belonging using multiple means, and that the support mechanisms they used changed a bit over time. By understanding the different ways that under-represented minorities are able to integrate into their college campuses and ultimately find a sense of community and belonging, engineering programs can work to develop strategies to better support under-represented minority students in their programs, potentially contributing to student persistence and retention.