2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this full research paper is to explore international engineering graduate students’ experiences in U.S. graduate programs through one year of short message service (SMS) (i.e., text message) survey data. Although international graduate students constitute a high proportion of engineering students in U.S. higher education contexts, there are few studies that specifically center them to contextualize their experiences. International graduate students experience unique challenges, such as acculturation, isolation, and Visa status, that impact attrition and student well-being. Previous studies are mainly focused on acculturation or language problems for students across disciplines. For engineering disciplines, the expectation of English language proficiency is different than other majors like humanities, and engineering students may rely on mathematical and experimental data more heavily than English proficiency to perform well in their research. Therefore, understanding how international graduate students reflect on their experiences highlights their uniqueness within engineering contexts, separating them from the other disciplines of international students. The first year of graduate school is a pivotal period for international graduate students with regard to adapting to a new culture and norms. As part of a larger, NSF-funded study on graduate-level attrition, persistence, and graduate student experiences, we used SMS surveys to follow n = 19 first-year international engineering PhD students from October 31, 2022, to October 27, 2023, surveying them three times per week. This paper offers a novel view of students, presenting a year’s worth of time series results with a population, first-year PhD international engineering students, that are not typically studied. Findings indicate that although first-year international students rarely considered leaving their programs, nor reflected that their stress related to school or life was overwhelming, their data show decreasing trends in the areas of satisfaction with advisor relationships, support networks, cost, goals, and quality of life and work. Together, these results imply that students’ acclimation process to graduate school in the U.S. is perhaps not happening innately. Further, our findings suggest future research should explore the variations between international students from different countries as they have different cultural backgrounds that may contribute to or influence their experiences.