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Background: Mental health for engineering undergraduates is an urgent topic for engineering educators. Narratives of engineering education requiring suffering may create or exacerbate problematic perceptions around stress and mental health in engineering. This study explored the roles of stress and mental health in engineering culture. We sought to explore: (1) how engineering students describe their experiences related to stress and mental health and (2) norms and expectations engineering students share about stress and mental health. Qualitative interview data were collected from 30 students who had previously responded to a college-wide survey. Results: Codes related to experiences with stress and mental health in engineering were organized in a bioecological systems model and analyzed for emergent themes depicting engineering culture. The study identified three themes related to stress and mental health in engineering culture: (1) engineering workload as a defining stressor, (2) specific barriers that prevent engineering students from seeking help for mental health concerns, and (3) reliance on peers to cope with stress and mental health distress. Conclusions: Our analysis provided insight into how engineering students perceive norms around stress and mental health in engineering and how this impacts help-seeking for mental health challenges. These findings have important implications for developing interventions and positive cultures that support student mental health.

Background: Stress is commonly experienced by college students, especially engineering students. However, the role of stress within engineering culture and its implications for engineering programs have not been fully explored in the literature. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to measure and examine the relationships among self-reported stress, anxiety, and depression; engineering identity; and perceptions of inclusion of undergraduate engineering students. Design/Method: We validated a quantitative survey instrument built on previously published scales and used it to measure self-reported stress, anxiety, and depression; engineering identity; and perceptions of inclusion. Results: Our findings indicate that self-reported levels of stress, anxiety, and depression are high for engineering students. Further, levels of stress and anxiety are significantly higher for female students, while levels of depression are higher for first-generation students. We find correlations between self-reported mental health symptoms, engineering identity, and perceptions of inclusion, and these relationships differ by gender. Lastly, we find that students underrepresented in engineering rate their departments as less diverse than their peers. Conclusions: Our results suggest that perceptions of inclusion and engineering identity are related to student mental health, further emphasizing the importance of developing inclusive cultures in engineering programs. The findings suggest that mental health needs greater attention in engineering education, particularly for female and first-generation students.

International calls for building capacity in engineering education research (EER) as a discipline have led to the development of workshops, training programs, and resources for scholars to learn and practice EER. Building capacity in EER as a discipline depends not only on the research skills of scholars, but also their sustained engagement in the discipline through the development of strong social networks. Understanding how scholars develop robust social networks through mentorship will support building research capacity in the field. This study was designed to answer the research question: How do established engineering education researchers help new engineering education researchers build social capital for EER through mentoring relationships? It draws on semi-structured interviews leveraging critical incident technique conducted with nine participants: two mentors and seven mentees. The findings suggest that mentors serve critical roles in the professional development of engineering faculty (academics) in EER as a discipline, providing training in methods and theories, developing mentees' social networks, and providing moral support for entering a new field. Building capacity efforts and related structured mentoring programs (and mentoring training) should emphasise the importance of developing mentees' social networks to support sustained engagement in EER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The importance of thriving is well-established, but little is known about thriving for undergraduate engineering students. We introduce engineering thriving as the process by which engineering students develop optimal functioning in undergraduate engineering programs. Since thriving is currently underexplored in the engineering education literature, we investigated the larger body of literature on engineering student success. Purpose: We introduce the concept of engineering thriving to synthesize the largely discrete existing bodies of literature on engineering student success to bring together many different perspectives, methodological approaches, and findings that shape our understanding of engineering thriving. Our work on thriving unites disparate lines of research on engineering student success, challenges the assumption that addressing barriers automatically leads to success, and strives to change the way engineering education views student success. Scope/Method: We used the scoping literature review method to investigate papers on undergraduate engineering student success. Four databases were searched, yielding 726 initial papers that studied separate dimensions of engineering student success, such as academic, personal, cognitive, and behavioral. We integrated the relationships among these dimensions to develop an understanding of engineering thriving. Our final analysis included 68 papers after removing duplicates and applying selection criteria. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that an engineering student thriving includes multiple dimensions of success, involves cyclical processes of growth and adaptation, and consists of synergistic competencies that should ideally be studied together with as many other competencies as possible. These findings support the conclusion that engineering thriving can be understood as helping students manage constantly changing internal and external factors within the broader engineering education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]