STEM Students outside the Classroom: The Role of the Institution in Defining Extracurricular Activity

This paper examines participation in extracurricular activities among engineering, computer science, and mathematics students at five diverse institutions in the United States. Data were extracted from over 1200 survey responses to capture the time students spent in extracurricular activities and the nature of those activities. Our results show that within an institution, the extent of involvement in extracurricular activities is consistent among different types of students. No significant differences in total extracurricular involvement were found across gender or ethnicity within any single institution. The broadest variation occurred across institutions. While the two larger institutions demonstrated extracurricular involvement on par with national averages, the smaller institutions demonstrated wide variations from this average. Although this research is cross-sectional and not longitudinal in nature, we conclude from our results that institutional culture, rather than student characteristics, has the strongest influence on what students do and how often they do it within extracurricular communities.