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The 2020 global pandemic caused by COVID-19 forced higher education institutions to immediately stop face-to-face teaching and transition to virtual instruction. This transition has been difficult for engineering education, which has strong hardware, software, and practical/laboratory components, and has further exacerbated the personal and professional experiences of minoritized students in engineering. This study sought to answer the following overarching research question: How has the abrupt transition to online instruction due to COVID-19 affected students traditionally underrepresented in engineering? The abrupt transition for minoritized students and their decision to prioritize their mental health was further explored to answer the following: (1) How many minoritized students chose to prioritize their mental health? (2) How do minoritized students describe their experiences and choices to prioritize (or not) their mental health? Using SenseMaker, participants shared stories using the following prompt: Imagine you are chatting with a friend or family member about the evolving COVID-19 crisis. Tell them about something you have experienced recently as an engineering student. After completing their narrative, a series of triadic, dyadic, and sentiment-based multiple-choice questions were presented. Student responses varied, including positive experiences, which resulted in a strong prioritization, while others had negative experiences resulting in varied prioritizations. Some students chose to prioritize their mental health to remain mentally and emotionally healthy; some with negative experiences abandoned self-care strategies in order to tend to the needs of academics and family. Participants’ decisions to prioritize their mental health were not monolithic.

in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She has been recognized as a Gates Millennium Scholar, GEM Associate Fellow, New Horizon Scholar, and a 2019 inductee into the Bouchet Honor Society. She completed her doctoral work at Virginia Tech where she focused on the impact matriculation structures have on self-efficacy development in electrical and computer engineering students. As well, she received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia respectively. Racheida believes in creating a diverse engineering field and strives to do so through connecting with teaching, and mentoring future engineers. She has devoted her life to this mission through her leadership and lifetime membership in the National Society of Black Engineers. Ultimately, Racheida aspires to bridge together research and pedagogy within the academy to improve engineering education within the field and across disciplines.

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Background: When COVID-19 cases began rising in early 2020, many universities transitioned online.Purpose/Hypothesis: This mixed-methods study examined how students, staff, and faculty members in a college of engineering experienced the early stages of the pandemic. We hypothesized that our prior work to build community and capacity around teaching and learning among faculty would support an empowered transition to online learning.Design/Method: We collected 70 participant accounts from April 10 to May 28, 2020 (students = 45, staff = 2, and faculty = 24). We collected these data using the SenseMaker® online survey platform. They comprised short stories written by the participants and quantitative data resulting from participant responses to a series of questions about their experiences. We used inferential statistics to determine pivotal variables that correlated to the emotional tone of a story and differentiated faculty and student experiences. Using these pivotal variables for interpretation, we examined participant stories to identify underlying trends in faculty and student experiences. Results:The majority of faculty members rated their stories positively (62%) while the majority of students rated their stories negatively (53%). Compared to students, faculty members reported greater opportunities, fewer struggles, higher levels of willingness to experiment, better treatment by people in positions of power, and more experiences of putting the needs of others before their own. Qualitatively, we identified two themesability and empowerment (or lack thereof) -to characterize the key differences between faculty and student experiences. Ability and empowerment are key facets of capacity.Conclusions: These findings confirm our hypothesis that prior work to build community and capacity around teaching and learning among faculty in our college supported an empowered transition to online learning. A next step in the development of our programming is finding ways to ensure our efforts lead to increased capacity for students, too.