Accumulating Summer Prestige With Outsider Status: Summer Decision-Making Challenges at Two Campuses

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Eighteen
  In Roundtable Session: Applying New Ways of Thinking: Understand Summer Programming and Parental Engagement (Table 2)

Abstract

This grounded theory study examined the ways that undergraduate students at two New England colleges navigate the summer experience process. Through surveys, interviews, and grounded theory analysis, a model for understanding the contexts and cognitive processes for maximizing their summers to avoid falling behind their peers emerged (the High Prestige Summer Experience Model). The full study demonstrated that there is a complex set of considerations that undergraduates consider to make their summers count in the ways that family, peers, campus culture, and society has told them are most important. This proposal focuses on the significant challenges the study uncovered for those trying to accumulate summer prestige outside the dominant system: student athletes, first generation and international students.

Author

• Erica Brown Soto, Boston College
  Presenting Author