2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering stress culture is a common phenomenon that many students are aware of but may not know how to verbalize or conceptualize. The culture of engineering has been described as one of stress, heavy workload, and burnout as a method of achieving one's goals. Engineering programs are considered rigorous and require hard work, which may include sacrifices to mental health and well-being. Students in engineering may struggle to understand or conceptualize their feelings of stress, overwhelm, burnout, and anxiety due to a limited range of vocabulary for self expression. Furthermore, the engineering stress culture has become so normalized that students may not even recognize that these are feelings of concern due to this culture being such a common shared experience amongst engineering students.

Over the course of three years, we administered a survey twice per semester to a cohort of undergraduate engineering students, establishing a total of ten time points. The survey sought to examine the perceptions of engineering stress culture and its influence on intention to remain in engineering. Each time point also included one to five open response questions for qualitative analysis. The survey captured over 3,000 engineering student responses over the three year time span. In this NSF Grantees Paper, we preview this data by presenting the open response results for the eighth time point. In the eighth time point we asked students “how do you know when you are feeling overwhelmed?” In order to analyze the open-response data, we used qualitative coding to generate a codebook for thematic analysis.

Results indicated that a majority of students were able to define or conceptualize the feeling of overwhelm and/or identify reactions they associated with being overwhelmed. However, other students struggled to identify the feeling of overwhelm, instead describing a constant state of overwhelm that they believed made it difficult to differentiate specific instances. Students associated feeling overwhelmed with feelings of stress, anxiety, and physical reactions to anxiety. Students attributed feeling overwhelmed to negative impacts on their mental or physical wellbeing. The negative connotation associated with feeling overwhelmed seemed to stem from student perceptions of time, workload, and methods of dealing with stress. Approaches to managing stress (e.g., making a list, taking a break) were inconsistently described as effective, with methods sometimes feeling beneficial, while others felt the methods caused more feelings of overwhelm.

Undergraduate students described intense reactions from feeling overwhelmed and a difficult time managing being overwhelmed. Sharing these understandings of overwhelm with educators with a greater understanding of undergraduate students’ experiences surrounding feeling overwhelmed. This may promote educators changing course structure to promote a more inclusive and supportive environment. This environment would support student well-being and emotional intelligence to allow for greater academic success and reduced stigma surrounding mental health.