Perceived Factors Contributing to the Subjective Wellbeing of Undergraduate Engineering Students: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Engineering education is perceived to be a tough field of study with detrimental effects on the mental health of undergraduate engineering students. High levels of anxiety and depression are reported among this population. Overall, mental health research is often biased toward looking at mental health from a deficit perspective and investigating mental health as a negative phenomenon. This trend also persists in engineering education research. The purpose of this exploratory study, therefore, is to investigate the condition of subjective wellbeing (SWB) of undergraduate engineering students to understand the factors that they perceive as positively contributing to their overall wellbeing in an engineering college environment. Qualitative data from eight undergraduate engineering students interviewed in fall 2021 in the college of engineering at a land grant public institution in the western USA were thematically analyzed. The resulting 11 themes were then re-grouped and conceptualized into 7 factors (faculty support, learning experiences, support environment, financial support, engineering practice opportunities, task organization, and task orientation) for clear mapping, understanding, and explanation. The outcomes from this research have positive implications for the SWB of undergraduate engineering students, with support from their educational institutions.

The Relation between Intergroup Contact and Subjective Well-Being among College Students at Minzu Universities: The Moderating Role of Social Support

“…According to the Main Effect Model and the Bumper Model, social support can not only maintain individuals’ positive emotional experience, but it also plays an augmentative role in terms of the sound development of individuals both physically and mentally [ 24 ]. High quality social support can provide an emotional echo for ethnic minority college students and improve their recognition of and satisfaction with their lives at universities [ 25 ]. On the contrary, when there is a lower degree of accessibility to social support, the negative contact can increase intergroup bias and in turn influence the level of well-being [ 26 ].…”

Institutional Role in the Mental Health and Well-being of Undergraduate Engineering Students: Student and Faculty Perspectives

“…Such experiences have been reported to contribute to positive student experiences and improved MHW. For example, engineering practice opportunities provided to engineering undergraduates create a sense of gratitude toward engineering colleges in these students and ultimately contribute to their wellbeing [11].…”

“…We learned from the faculty interviews that they realized the need to be cognizant of the stressful and challenging academic situation in undergraduate engineering and were in support of improving the faculty-student communication process for positive contributions to the MHW of their students. Faculty support has been reported to be vital to psychological constructs such as academic satisfaction, academic efficacy, school connectedness, and college gratitude of engineering undergraduates [11]. These constructs contribute to human subjective wellbeing [30], or a state of happiness and life satisfaction where we think and feel that our life is going well and not bad [31].…”

“…Such an environment should not only assist students facing mental health challenges but may also provide a shield to prevent such difficulties. In addition to student perceptions, we were also interested in faculty perceptions because our recent research suggested students perceive faculty to be the most important factor in their MHW across several psychological domains including cognitive (academic satisfaction and academic efficacy), social (school connectedness), and emotional (college gratitude) [11]. Mental health research may use phrases like mental illness and mental problems to indicate adverse mental health, and/or mental wellness and mental wellbeing to refer to prosperous mental health.…”

“…The present study was part of a larger study with several other publications [11][12][13][14]. The focus of the larger study was the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of undergraduate students.…”