Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is the largest of the 23 colleges in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), annually serving 75,000 students as they pursue associate degrees and transfer to universities for a bachelor’s degree. The number of students who are attending NOVA with engineering as their declared degree program is noticeably greater than the number of students actually enrolled in engineering courses. To characterize and address this gap, NOVA in collaboration with Virginia Tech (VT), will examine the policies and practices of the college that contribute to creating students’ professional disposition as engineers, including the ways in which classes and activities make them feel like engineers. The project will also use transfer data to demonstrate how community college students experience and navigate existing engineering transfer pathways. This will result in a future IUSE: RED proposal in which NOVA and VT can engage in structural change to work toward establishing a department that is more supportive of students and their transfer success. Findings will be shared with institutional peers as they seek to make similar academic and operational improvements, in full alignment with the priorities of the IUSE:RED program. To accomplish these goals, this work will focus on three research questions: (1) How do community college students develop their dispositions as engineers? (2) How do NOVA faculty, staff, and leaders experience the current aca