2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full-length Empirical Research paper reports the protective mechanisms and risk factors that influence academic resiliency among underrepresented engineering students. This study leveraged the Academic Resilience Model (ARM) by Durso and colleagues (2021) as a conceptual framework to code factors. The ARM is grounded in resilience theory and frames key dynamics consisting of three interconnected systems: the individual system, the academic system, and the external system. Each system includes two sets of factors, protective and risk, which can influence students’ satisfaction and commitment to their chosen program. This paper focuses on the academic system, and reports on protective mechanisms and risk factors that are potentially malleable by universities.

This study used a qualitative thematic analysis of retrospective
interview transcripts to follow a cohort of engineering students who began their engineering program in Fall 2020, when restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic were at their highest. This cohort was of particular interest because the pandemic served as a natural stress test that revealed the academic system’s ability to enhance or hinder students’ academic resiliency that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Results are from select transcripts of 3 students from this cohort, based on 60-90 minute semi-structured interviews in spring 2023 when these students were in their third year of the engineering program. The 3 students' interview responses for this paper were chosen based on the following factors: (a) identifying as a member of an underrepresented group in engineering (two African-American students – one female and one male; and one Caucasian female); (b) willingness during the interview to share a substantial number of codeable comments; and (c) being overall representative of the comments from the larger group of interviews.

Results will share student perspectives (including quotes and direct connections they drew) on university supported and affiliated resources and factors that these individuals found both helpful and not helpful. Broadly, many of their perspectives fell into one of the following categories: (1) Importance of connecting with peers, both as a frame of reference against which to compare themselves as well as the value of collaborative learning. As expected, the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social isolation made that particularly difficult in their first year, which they had to then make efforts to overcome subsequently, including with help from classes that provided peer collaboration structures. (2) Importance of affinity groups (such as National Society of Black Engineers, or Engineers without Borders student chapter, or an engineering sorority) and the value they took from connections with those groups. (3) The helpfulness of some professors, and the lack of helpfulness from others, with insightful characterizations about why specific individuals were helpful or not. (4) The importance of the University-structured co-operative learning semesters with industry as well as course-based projects for bolstering their sense of belonging based on reflecting on their skills and knowledge and how that would connect with the ‘real world’ of engineering. These and other results will offer universities, programs, and faculty possibilities for strengthening the sense of belonging and overall resiliency for underrepresented engineering students.