Work-In-Progress: Exploring the wellness perceptions of engineering and science faculty.

This work-in-progress research paper explores faculty's experiences during their own undergraduate programs, as well as the role of health and wellbeing in their success as students. The culture of stress and hardship promoted in engineering education has been scrutinized as negatively affecting students, especially those from marginalized groups. However, little is currently known about the interactions among multiple actors in the engineering education ecosystem and their contributions to perpetuating such culture. Faculty directly impact students' experiences in engineering programs through first-hand interactions with students. These interactions can propagate professional beliefs and attitudes that our graduates instill and further propagate. Thus, faculty may be re-enacting attitudes that they learned through their own experiences as students. Therefore, their beliefs might bring insights into elements that have been persistent in the engineering education narrative. In this work in progress paper, we use the model of engineering thriving to analyze interviews with four engineering faculty and analyze the transcripts using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. This study is part of a larger project to contribute to the efforts to evolve engineering's current culture of hardship and suffering to one that recognizes health, wellbeing, and thriving permeating essential academic spaces like the classroom. In this project, we seek to understand faculty conceptualizations of health and well-being that developed through their undergraduate and graduate experiences. Our preliminary results show that the undergraduate experiences of faculty included elements of thriving and well-being such as self-knowledge and self-control. Some identified key turning points in realizing their best strategies to maximize their well-being and academic success, which enhanced their decision-making abilities. Furthermore, some participants achieved academic success despite poor well-being and thriving outcomes, which raises questions about the cultural and systemic factors that promote such dualism. In terms of the messages they received about well-being, faculty recognized the absence of explicit messages but acknowledged the existence of institutional structures that could support them if necessary (such as counseling services or professional societies). Finally, when comparing their experiences with those of current undergraduates, faculty identify issues with excessive technology, imposter syndrome, low extracurricular engagement, and low functionality among the elements against the newer generation's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]