Improving sense of belonging in biomedical engineering students through student-faculty lunches

Introduction Full undergraduate experience in biomedical engineering should feature cordial interactions between students and faculty as well as a good sense of belonging. However, both factors remain elusive for many students, rendering their undergraduate experience suboptimal. We designed the organized student-faculty lunches to promote informal student-faculty interactions and the formation of belonging among the student participants.Methods During each lunch, an average of four student participants were paired with one faculty and a student assistant. Lunches were provided at no cost to all participants. Invites for students were based on matching interests during recruitment. A mixed-methods survey, including eight identical Likert-scale questions and up to three free-response questions, was distributed three times: before, immediately after, and 1 month after the lunch. We collected a total of 42 responses for the post-survey and 28 responses for the one-month survey. Four students participated in a 30-minute interview. We used paired t-tests to analyze the Likert-scale questions across the three surveys. We performed regression analysis to quantify the equity in the outcomes of these lunches. We obtained guidelines for conducting these lunches in the future through regression analysis and thematic coding of the surveys and the interviews.Results We found that the student-faculty lunches generated significant positive impact across all eight Likert-scale questions across three domains of belonging: academic, social, and personal space. Improvements in survey questions within the social and personal space domains tend to be longer lasting and more statistically significant. The regression analyses revealed that our interventions resulted in better parity in sense of belonging among students with different years of academic experience, ethnic identities, and gender identities. These analyses also suggest that the most effective lunch is conducted in the middle of the Winter quarter with an Assistant Professor. Coding analyses revealed that the students were highly satisfied with the lunches and the current format of facilitation, while noting the benefits of these lunches in reducing the interaction barriers between students and faculty. We intend to perform more qualitative analyses on aspects of equity and faculty demographics concerning their impact on the outcomes of these lunches.