Purpose. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the meaning of the lived experience of interactions with faculty members on course-related or substantive issues outside the classroom for traditional, Hispanic undergraduate students at a private, religiously-affiliated, not-for-profit university with a diverse student body in the southeast of the United States. The meanings of the interactions were developed from students’ descriptions of these interactions obtained in semi-structured interviews. These descriptions were interpreted by means of transcendental phenomenological analysis (Moustakas, 1994), which sought to arrive at the essential structure of the interactions of these students with faculty. In addition, the meanings that students gave as to how the interaction affected their outcomes were explored.

Method. The study was a qualitative study which employed the transcendental phenomenological research method (Moustakas, 1994) to analyze the lived experiences of six traditional, Hispanic undergraduate students. The participants were recruited employing various methods, which included snowball sampling, emails, direct contact, and student referrals, and were selected by using criterion sampling. All the participants consented to participate in the study and completed a questionnaire on their student-faculty interactions and their background information. The data of the study were the verbatim transcriptions of the recorded semi-structured interviews with the participants. The data were analyzed by following Moustakas’ (1994) “Modification of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen Method of Analysis of Phenomenological Data” (p.121) and the observations of Creswell (1998). This analysis produced a universal description of the experience of interacting with faculty for the participants of the study. In addition, matrices, which organized the various themes and meaning units derived from the verbatim transcriptions, were created. The matrices allowed for the development of the major and minor themes of the participants’ experience of the phenomenon, including the participants’ descriptions concerning the impacts of the interaction.

Major findings. The first major finding or result of the study was that the study provided a universal description of the essential structure of student-faculty interaction outside the classroom for the traditional, Hispanic undergraduate participants of the study. The second major finding pertains to the major and some minor themes discovered in the description of the participants’ experience of the phenomenon. The study found that the participants believed that some professors setup obstacles to interacting with their students and that these obstacles discouraged interactions. In addition, the study found that some of the participants experienced strong negative emotions like nervousness, fear, stress, and worry while interacting. Furthermore, the participants also related that many of their professors took their time to interact with them even when they were busy and that they answered all their questions and were helpful and understanding. Finally, regarding the impact of the interaction, the participants related that the interaction had an enabling or facilitation effect on their work as students.