2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Research paper examines well-being of six consecutive first-year engineering student cohorts at a large research-intensive university. The work expands on previously published results with the addition of the measurement of stress and an intervention related to the impact of competitive program placement on stress and well-being.

Academic pressures and personal challenges negatively affect well-being for all students, but first-year students face additional stressors as they transition into an unfamiliar environment. Notably, class sizes tend to be much larger than what most students are used to, there is a greater emphasis on self-responsibility, the social setting is new and lacking an established network of friends, and, in many cases, students have a new living environment away from home and in an unfamiliar city or country. The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a research-intensive university with a first-year engineering cohort of roughly 1,000 students. The first year is common for all students, after which they apply to enter their engineering program (major) in second year through a competitive process, adding one more stressor.

The study goal is to better understand not only which stressors affect well-being of first-year engineering students, but when students are most impacted by those stressors. Through quantitative methods, week-to-week changes in students’ self-reported stressors and their associated well-being have been tracked for six consecutive first-year cohorts from 2019 to 2024. Data have been collected through weekly anonymous and optional “check-in surveys” with three main sections: well-being, stress and stressors, and demographics. Well-being is assessed through the seven-item, short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS). Students rate how often in the past two weeks they have felt optimistic, relaxed, useful, etc. on a 5-point scale (1 = none of the time to 5 = all of the time). In terms of stressors, a previous qualitative study conducted in 2018 at UBC identified common stressors in first-year engineering. In the surveys for this study, students select and rank up to five of these stressors based on what they are most concerned about. Starting in 2023, to measure stress level, questions from the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) were added to the survey. PSS uses a similar 5-point scale as WEBMWS but in this case based on the frequency of feelings related to stress (e.g., feeling unable to control irritations or cope with everything that has to be done). The final section of the survey includes questions on demographics, including gender, ethnicity/nationality, disability, and previous experience.

Results show consistency in trends over the six years of the study. At the start of each year, well-being scores from WEMWBS average slightly above the midpoint (corresponding to students feeling optimistic, relaxed, useful, etc. a little more often than “some of the time”). The WEMWBS scores then show a slow, steady, and statistically significant decline in well-being corresponding to approximately 10% of the full WEMWBS scale over the academic year. The measurements of stress reveal a similar trend; the overall average stress is near the middle of the PSS scale but there is a gradual increase in stress over the academic year corresponding to roughly 6% of the PSS range. In terms of stressors, the patterns are very stable year-to-year and the most prevalent relate to academic considerations. In both academic terms of first year, academic factors comprise roughly 55% of all student concerns at the start of each term, increasing roughly linearly to approximately 65% by the end. The specific academic stressors include getting high grades (16%), second-year program placement (16%), passing (15%), and workload (13%). The next most prevalent groups of stressors involve various personal concerns, such as maintaining a healthy lifestyle (totaling 23%), followed by various non-academic school concerns, like adjusting to university (9%), external stressors such as finances (6%), and EDI-related stressors (0.8%). Importantly, the 2024 data also capture the impact of a recent program change to guarantee some students placement into their second-year program of choice. This has only slightly reduced but not eliminated program placement as a stressor (drop from 16% to 13%); it is not clear why but these students with guaranteed placement have been reporting higher stress (12% higher PSS) and lower well-being (8% lower SWEBMWS) relative to students who do not have guaranteed placement. Statistically significant differences based on gender, disability, and nationality are also present in all findings. Overall, this study highlights how academic stressors dominate first-year engineering student concerns, and how those stressors slowly but steadily diminish well-being.