"Just a little bit on the outside for the whole time": Social belonging confidence and the persistence of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence students

TL;DR

This study explores how social belonging and confidence influence persistence among ML/AI students, highlighting the importance of mentorship and perceptions of the field to improve diversity and retention.

Contribution

It provides initial qualitative insights into factors affecting persistence in ML/AI students, emphasizing social belonging, confidence, and mentorship as key elements.

Findings

Students' interest and programming confidence influence their persistence.

Exposure, field boundaries, and skills beliefs shape students' career intentions.

Mentorship and social belonging are crucial for student motivation.

Abstract

The growing field of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) presents a unique and unexplored case within persistence research, meaning it is unclear how past findings from engineering will apply to this developing field. We conduct an exploratory study to gain an initial understanding of persistence in this field and identify fruitful directions for future work. One factor that has been shown to predict persistence in engineering is belonging; we study belonging through the lens of confidence, and discuss how attention to social belonging confidence may help to increase diversity in the profession. In this research paper, we conduct a small set of interviews with students in ML/AI courses. Thematic analysis of these interviews revealed initial differences in how students see a career in ML/AI, which diverge based on interest and programming confidence. We identified how exposure and initiation, the interpretation of ML and AI field boundaries, and beliefs of the skills required to succeed might influence students' intentions to persist. We discuss differences in how students describe being motivated by social belonging and the importance of close mentorship. We motivate further persistence research in ML/AI with particular focus on social belonging and close mentorship, the role of intersectional identity, and introductory ML/AI courses.