Belonging story and belonging strategies
Confusion reads to students as a verdict on whether they belong here
A student whose last mathematics course was eight years ago sits beside someone with a statistics degree, and week three separates them visibly.
What it is
A short first-person account of a time you were uncertain you belonged, told to four required elements. The fellowship’s governing sentence is that a belonging story must both communicate that worries about belonging are normal and show how those concerns resolve over time. A story that only normalizes is a shrug. A story that only resolves is a competence display.
The fellowship offers a four-item menu of belonging concerns to target. In a quantitative seminar it is almost always the third, that one’s skills or knowledge are not on par with peers.
Run it
- Pick the concern first, then the story. Pick the one your course actually produces.
- Write to four elements, in order. Describe an experience that evoked belonging uncertainty. Acknowledge the concern as real and valid. Say that it is common to question belonging when facing challenges. Describe how it improved over time, through specific actions you took.
- Name doors, not dispositions. The last element has to be something a student could go and do, not a change of attitude that happened to you.
- Deliver it in the first week, in six to eight minutes. Tell a second one at the midpoint, when the first hard assessment comes back.
Say this
If your own story is not one you want to tell
At the end of term, ask two or three students for a paragraph you can read aloud next year, anonymously:
“Think back to a point this semester when you were not sure you could do this work, or not sure you belonged in this room. What was it, and what changed? I would like to read a few of these, without names, to next year’s students.”
Use their words. A paraphrase does not read as genuine, and genuine is what the effect depends on.
The fellowship offers the peer story as a fallback for instructors uncomfortable with self-disclosure. The evidence runs the other way. The peer story is the tested version and the personal one is the extrapolation.
In my courses
Run in EPI 501 (Fall 2025). Planned for EPI 601, weeks 1 and 2.
I will share a brief story about a time I struggled with understanding a core epidemiologic concept (e.g., confounding vs. interaction) and how working through that confusion shaped my approach to research. I will invite students to share (in writing or aloud) a challenge they have faced in their epi training so far.
This is one of the few practices already carried out rather than planned. In EPI 501 the belonging story activity drew positive survey feedback, and belonging concerns improved across the semester. The change for 601 is to run it earlier and revisit it at the midpoint rather than telling it once.
Evidence
The best-powered trial covered 26,911 students at 22 institutions and raised first-year completion, but only where students’ groups were afforded opportunities to belong (Walton et al., 2023). That moderator is the finding. Asserting that things get better is a testable claim about your department, and students evaluate it against what they observe.
Averaged over everyone the effect is not distinguishable from zero. A federal review of 14 studies found mixed effects, achievement at d = 0.16 and not significant, and the closest setting to a quantitative course, an introductory calculus study, came out at d = −0.26 (What Works Clearinghouse, 2022). The effects that survive concentrate in specific groups (Murphy et al., 2020; Walton & Cohen, 2011).
Nobody has tested this on doctoral students. Every trial recruits people entering something, so the population in a seminar where the theory plausibly applies is narrower: first-semester students, people who switched in from clinical training, international students in their first US quantitative course.