Sindia M. Rivera-Jimenez, Ph.D., knows a thing or two about transfer students.
A former community college professor who now teaches at the University of Florida’s Department of Engineering Education (EEd), she has helped many students — including her son — transition into universities and overcome what experts call “transfer shock.”
Now, thanks to a grant and a national best-paper award, she and her team will dig deeper into those challenges. Their three-year research project ultimately will recommend stronger support systems for engineering transfer students.
Rivera-Jimenez recently received a $536,000 National Science Foundation award for her project “An Exploration of Challenges and Self-Adjustment Experiences of Community College Transfer Students in Engineering.”
“At its core, this is foundational research in engineering education that will explore how transfer students navigate challenges and adapt during their transition into engineering,” Rivera-Jimenez noted.
As part of this award, Rivera-Jimenez and her team will launch the Engineering Leaders in Transfer Engagement (ELITE) program to bolster success among transfer students in the College of Engineering. ELITE will establish partnerships between undergraduate coordinators and academic advisors working with transfer students. ELITE will present opportunities to help with academic strategies.
Additionally, the team won the 2025 Best Conference Paper at the American Society of Engineering Education conference this summer. “Adjustment Experiences Among Engineering Transfer Students: A Pilot Study at a Four-Year Institution in Florida” was selected out of 2,460 papers.
This pilot study will focus on students transferring from community colleges and examine transfer experiences beyond the immediate transfer shock at research intebsive institutions.
“In this project, we’re following UF engineering transfer students across multiple semesters to explore how their adjustment changes over time,” said Caroline Lubbe, a Ph.D. candidate and the paper’s primary author. “We hope our findings can help all universities design better support systems for transfer students.”
The paper also was selected as Best Paper in the Two-Year College Division. The authors are Lubbe, Rivera-Jiménez, Ayla Beon Y. Sevilleno and Justin C. Ortagus, Ph.D., a former associate professor with UF’s Higher Education Administration program.
In what Rivera-Jiménez calls the “magic of cross-disciplinary collaborations,” she said UF’s Institute of Higher Education helped the team gather preliminary data for their transfer student research.
“This proposal came about because I was a faculty member at Santa Fe, and when I transferred to UF as an assistant professor in engineering, I realized the transfer-student community wasn’t really served,” Rivera-Jiménez said.
First-year students — those with a four-year path — have their own programs and dedicated advisors. Not so much for transfer students.
It is common for GPAs to dip well below community college grades after students transfer to universities.
“We’re going to do a longitudinal study where we follow students the moment they start, all the way, hopefully, until they finish,” Rivera-Jiménez said.
Much of transfer shock comes from an avalanche of life changes.
“When engineering transfer students start at a new institution,” Lubbe said, “they might be moving to a new city, exploring a new college campus, meeting new people, taking harder classes and getting used to a different academic environment, all in a short period of time. That combination makes the transition challenging.”
That hits home for engineering student Sofia Montiel, a Santa Fe College transfer who served as a co-author on an early paper for this project.
“This research felt very personal to me,” said Montiel. “I am an international student who first had to adapt to a community college in a new country and then transferred to an R1 university. That transition came with unique challenges like adjusting to the culture, learning to navigate resources, and finding a sense of belonging, but it also gave me resilience and perspective.”
Transfer-student enrollment for all majors is growing at American universities. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s fall 2024 report noted college transfer enrollment in 2024 grew 7.9% from the fall of 2020.
According to UF’s 2019 annual report on admissions, UF’s College of Engineering had 1,058 transfer applications, with 384 accepted and 285 enrolled in 2019.
“We have 20 years of data from the College of Engineering,” Rivera-Jiménez said. “UF has a higher success rate compared to other institutions, and the reason is UF is a research-intensive institution with a highly selective process, so that means the students who come to UF, just because it’s highly selective, have a higher chance to be more successful in terms of degree completion and the amount of time it takes.”
The team is centering on giving students the “agency to be flexible and create coping mechanisms because, at UF, they are successful, so we want to know why,” Rivera-Jiménez said.
The team also will employ photovoice, a qualitative research method that will involve photographs and narratives from the transfer students in the study.
“I want to do more than interviews. I want to also create a visual exposition of the students’ experiences,” Rivera-Jiménez said. “Basically, they are going to take pictures, and then, during the interview, we talk about it. My vision is that we maybe have an exhibition of the students’ pictures.”
Rivera-Jiménez praised the EEd Department Chair Idalis Villanueva Alarcón for her support, as well as the College of Engineering’s Advising Office for its collaboration.
“The goal,” Rivera-Jiménez said, “is to strengthen pathways and build more supportive environments for all students as they move through critical career transitions.”