In 1998, the Agricultural Engineering programme at Iowa State University turned to the pedagogical innovation termed `learning communities' in an effort to enhance student retention and to bring coherence and meaning to our first-year student curriculum. Not only has the learning community helped us to increase our first-year, first time student retention in the major of Agricultural Engineering (AE), it has helped us to address many of our AE programme objectives including students' abilities to function on multi-disciplinary teams, communicate effectively and have knowledge of important contemporary issues. Results of the AE learning community assessment efforts suggest that students are overwhelmingly satisfied with the programme.