Social educational robotics literature indicates robots have entered the education domain with positive benefits for the learner. A key question remains: what is the lived experience of student interaction with social educational robots in the education environment? This study employed a qualitative phenomenological methodology to investigate the lived experience of student interaction with an autonomous, artificially intelligent, social educational robot (SER) in a university classroom. Two research questions guided the study: 1. How do Generation Z university students describe and understand the lived experience of their interaction with a social educational robot in a philosophy course? 2. How does Generation Z university students' interaction with a social educational robot affect their lived experience of being human? The researcher used purposeful and selective sampling to recruit eight participants. Verbatim interview transcripts were the source of the study data, and the researcher used a descriptive phenomenological method to analyze the data and discover the essence of the whole experience. The findings identify the interaction as a radical change in the classroom, an experience that brought a new awareness of the learners' identity formation, and the experience contributed to students' existential angst. The findings contribute to a gap in the literature regarding the descriptive lived experience of student interaction with social educational robots. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]