“It Felt Like a Little Community”: Supporting Rural Appalachian College Students

Abstract

Students from rural Appalachian regions often face increased career development barriers within university spaces. As part of an NSF-funded program, we provided diverse, structured supports for a group of STEM majors from rural Appalachian backgrounds. We utilized narrative inquiry to interview 10 Program participants, which allowed us to explore which supports they described as impactful, including graduate student mentors, their fellow program peers, program coordinators, campus supports, and other various campus faculty. Participants further described being impacted in a variety of ways: as an individual person, in their research pursuits, in their future plans, academically, and financially through the program’s scholarship. Specifically, they described strategies for success and the importance of belonging as impactful. Implications for future college support programming and for how to best support the career development of rural Appalachian college students, along with suggestions for future research needs and limitations to the research, are provided.