Building Community For First And Second Year Students In The Agricultural And Biosystems Engineering Department At Iowa State University

A residence hall living community has provided a new way for our firstand second-year students in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (ABE) at Iowa State University to build community and to become involved members of our department. An optional component of our ABE First-Year Learning Community, the ABE Living Community was recently expanded to include second-year students to accommodate student requests. Not only does the living community offer a way for students to develop friendships, it also creates an environment well suited for academic work. Our paper includes an overview of our ABE living community, which includes both engineering and technology students. We developed this arrangement to strengthen students’ existing learning communities through additional interaction with ABE peers in a living community, to encourage interaction and collaboration between our two undergraduate student majors, and to increase interaction of these students with the ABE faculty. In addition, we present the results of our assessment, which includes a year-end survey, student responses to a writing prompt, and student focus groups.