Table 5 Drawbacks of participating in the summer bridge program. Coded drawbacks are in order from highest to lowest frequency, and sample responses are provided for each code. Seventeen out of 29 participants did not articulate any drawbacks. Some of the other twelve participants described multiple drawbacks, resulting in a total of 22 coded segments

Time Intensive (7)

“Maybe timing. It was just a tiring program, a very intense program in terms of time. It took us from 8:00 in the morning to like maybe sometimes at six. We were not living on campus, so that made it even harder.

Commute/Parking (6)

“If you're commuting, that took another couple of hours. So, you definitely can't have anything else going on in your life. Like, you need to be able to dedicate all your time to doing it.”

Workload (4)

“We have our lives, and we just can’t drop everything. I just feel like I really wish [the summer bridge program] would have taken into account that we’re completely new to this environment and given us time in the program to do homework. Because I had done a previous program at [another university], a research program, and we did that. We had that extra time to do research, I mean to do our homework and that was implemented into the program.”

Stress (3)

“And we had really short lunch breaks or really short breaks. I was very stressed out at that time, and that’s something that I wish they would keep in mind, like the health of the student, or just like we’re new to [the university] and it’s a very stressful situation, for me at least.”

Advanced Content (2)

“But in in my year, we had to attend talks for I think Master’s and Ph.D. students. Those were very high level compared to our level as students coming from community college. So, we would go and sit and attend the talks, but we couldn’t like understand everything that was being said there. But, it was good in a way because I got to know professors that I would see in the campus and know like, oh, this is this professor, this professor does that, so I used that to learn about what research experiences, what research labs are doing here, but I couldn’t understand the details of the talks I was attending.”