2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mental health is a growing area of concern for many undergraduate students, where students experience stress related to factors such as unfamiliar situations or increased workloads. Within engineering, students must also deal with unique stressors that come from engineering culture. Notably, the normalization of high stress and a lack of perceived support from peers and faculty can reduce engineering student wellness. Therefore, to better understand how to support engineering student well-being, we conducted focus groups using a methodology called Group Level Assessment (GLA). Through this process, participants are led through a series of seven steps that start with helping participants to define the challenges that they face related to prioritizing their well-being and creating action plans to address them. To define the challenges that students face, participants were asked to respond to two surveys. First, participants were asked questions about how their mental health and sense of belonging were impacted by themselves, their classmates, their instructors, their college, and engineering culture. Second, participants were sent a survey containing all of the participant responses to each question and were asked to identify which prompts they felt were most “important”, which we defined as, “impacting a substantial number of participants, significantly impacting a smaller number of participants, deserving immediate attention, and/or resonating with a participant’s own experience.” Here, we present the results of these two surveys that helped to define the challenges that engineering students face in prioritizing their own well-being and sense of belonging. Using thematic analysis, several common themes were identified: 1) students felt that time management and establishing a work life balance would help improve their mental well-being, 2) students wanted to feel a greater sense of community with their classmates, and less of a sense of competition, 3) students want to feel understood and supported by faculty members, both mentally and academically, 4) students want better access to campus resources, including social, health, academic, and housing resources, 5) students feel pressured to perform highly and that the large workload they contributes to their stress, and 6) students feel that engineering culture needs to value asking for help and taking breaks. While the themes identified here represent the interpretation of the prompts by the research team, the prompts were also brought forward into in-person focus groups, which allowed students themselves to identify and prioritize themes related to their experiences and develop action plans to address these challenges. Together, these findings can be brought to faculty and college administrators to address student concerns and improve students’ overall well-being.