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Biomedical Engineering Education

Biomedical Engineering Education - Poster Session A

Poster E8 - A Mixed-Methods Study to Assess Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Conceptualization of Feeling Overwhelmed

Thursday, October 24, 2024
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EST
Location: Exhibit Hall E, F & G

Introduction:  Engineering programs are recounted as difficult, requiring hard work, and heavy workload as simply part of the program. The culture of engineering has been described as requiring experiences of high stress, sacrifices to well-being, and burnout in order to succeed. Engineering stress culture is a common phenomenon that many students experience but may not know how to verbalize. Reporting undergraduate engineering students’ stress and mental health has proven to be challenging due to the dynamic relationship of stress and well-being. Although self-reported measures of student emotions have been proven reliable, studies often do not capture dynamics of student stress due to them being administered at a single point in time. Students may only report how they feel in the moment or at their most dramatic time, or an average over a limited timeframe (e.g., three weeks). Thus, it does not provide an accurate representation of the fluctuation of student emotions and well-being throughout the academic year. In addition, Students in engineering may struggle to communicate and differentiate their feelings of stress, overwhelm, burnout, and anxiety or simply regard it as something else due to a limited range of vocabulary for self expression. Furthermore, the engineering stress culture has become so normalized that students may not even recognize that these are feelings of concern due to beliefs that it is a normal and expected experience amongst engineering students.

Materials and

Methods:  Over the course of two years, a survey was administered twice per semester to a cohort of undergraduate engineering students, establishing a total of eight timepoints. The survey sought to examine the perceptions of engineering stress culture and its influence on intention to remain in the engineering program. The survey included 71 Likert scale items, 10 of which made up the Engineering Stress Culture Scale (ESC), and 48 items for Undergraduate Engineering Stressors, both developed by our team. In addition to seven previously validated items from the DASS-21 stress subscale, and the remaining six questions were an adapted subscale of Intention to Remain for engineering. Each timepoint also included one to five open response questions for qualitative analysis. Demographic questions in the survey consisted of first generation status, gender identity, financial status, and ethnicity. The survey captured 2,883 responses over the two year time span, with a total of 587 participants. Descriptive statistics were used to identify possible relationships amongst variables in timepoint 8 and guide linear and logistic regression models. Linear regression models were used to examine the predictive relationships of variables to engineering undergraduate stress and changes to these relationships over time. Logistic regression models were used to comprehend the impact of aspects of engineering stress culture on student intention to remain in engineering. Qualitative coding was used to generate a codebook for the additional open-response questions. These codes were used to understand students’ conceptualizations of feeling overwhelmed.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: Quantitative analysis found that two factors – related to environment and future preparation – that are negatively correlated to intention to remain, were strong predictors for a students’ intention to remain. Five factors related to environment, programmatic mental health communication, work-life balance, engineering program rigor, and job market competitiveness, were found to hold strong predictive power for predicting a student’s stress levels. We compared means of stress levels between several identities including: first generation status, race and ethnicity, as well as gender identity. The comparisons reported first generation students as having higher stress levels than non-first generation students. It was also found that students who identify as women or gender non-conforming, reported higher levels of stress than those who identified as men.

Analysis of qualitative coding indicated that conceptualizing being overwhelmed was possible for the majority of students. Most students were able to identify physiological reactions they associated with being overwhelmed. However, other students struggled to identify the feeling due to them believing they were in a constant state of overwhelm, so it felt no different from their current state. Students attributed feeling overwhelmed to feelings of stress, anxiety, and physical reactions with negative impacts on their mental or physical well-being. The negative connotation associated with feeling overwhelmed seemed to stem from student perceptions of time, workload, and methods of dealing with stress. Varying coping strategies to stress led to students feeling overwhelmed. The approaches could be deemed contradictory as some students found it necessary to accelerate their working pace while others felt the need to slow down. Both led to feeling overwhelmed despite these being opposite coping strategies.

Linear and logistic regressions showed that feeling overwhelmed had less predictive power over a student’s stress and intention to remain compared to other factors measured in this study. Undergraduate students were found to have intense reactions from feeling overwhelmed and a difficult time managing being overwhelmed. Students of marginalized identities experiencing increased stress levels compared to non-marginalized identities.

We aim to increase undergraduate emotional health and adapt campus resources and courses to allow for greater success of all identities.

Acknowledgements (Optional):  This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1943541. The authors thank project advisory board members Jennifer Cromley, Allison Godwin, and Nicola Sochacka for feedback on the research design and analysis. We also thank Thrive Lab community members for support and guidance throughout. We thank the undergraduate student participants for sharing their voices and experiences.