2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Working Paper Title: “A Scoping Literature Review of Mental Health of Engineering Graduate Students: Who is Missing from the Conversation?”

For the past several years, concern about the mental health of graduate students overall has garnered substantial attention, and some studies have shown that graduate students in STEM, specifically, are at elevated risk for experiencing mental health challenges. Simultaneously, numerous studies have provided powerful insights about the gendered and racialized experiences that Women of Color (WOC) navigate within STEM environments, including the detrimental impact of those experiences on their mental health. Yet, less is known about how interlocking systems of oppression tied to gender, race, and nationality influence the well-being of international WOC (IWOC) in STEM, who comprise a significant portion of the WOC within the STEM graduate programs within the United States.
This paper presents a descriptive summary of the trends in publications obtained as part of a scoping literature review focused on understanding existing scholarship on the topic of mental health among graduate students in engineering, with a specific interest in scholarship focused on the mental health of international WOC in engineering. The data sources for the study include the Scopus, PsycINFO, Eric, Engineering Village, and Science Direct databases, and the keywords used to search the databases were “Mental health,” "Graduate students," "engineering," and "depression and anxiety.” These keywords encompass all graduate students within engineering (rather than only international WOC) because of our anticipation that there is very limited existing research focused on the mental health of international WOC graduate students in engineering. The inclusion criterion includes peer-reviewed journal and conference papers published between the years 2005 and 2023, written exclusively in English.
The search produced 958 articles, and after removing duplicates, there were a total of 741 remaining articles. The descriptive trends presented here will include addressing aspects of the articles such as the yearly volume of publications, variations in emphasis on mental health prior to, during, and post-COVID-19, research methods utilized, the language used to describe mental health, and the temporal changes in the existence (or absence of ) quantity and research focused on the mental health of the following student groups: international graduate students, women graduate students, WOC graduate students, and international WOC graduate students.
The overarching goal of this paper will be to offer a depiction of the evolving landscape in this domain over nearly two decades, motivating opportunities for future research. By delving into the trends and focal points of these publications, we aim to both shed light on the evolving discourse surrounding the mental health of graduate engineering students and to highlight who we are including and excluding in these conversations.