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Culture, Surprise, And Adaptation: Examining Undergraduate Students’ Matriculation Processes, Catherine W. Barber

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to (a) explore undergraduate students’ experiences as they transitioned to the university, (b) explore how the cultures of students’ hometowns influenced student culture at the university, and (c) provide a conceptual model which has analytical generalizability across higher education.

This ethnographic research focuses on developing a cultural knowledge of hometown community culture. While previous research examined how college affects students, this research reverses the approach and investigates how the students and their hometown community values actually affect the college community. To investigate these topics, I did ethnographic observation including trips to students’ hometowns and …