2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Research Paper details a qualitative exploration of the anxieties that first-year engineering students report experiencing at the beginning and end of their first year.

Motivation: Students are worried about the future, and sometimes the anxieties that they experience impact their schoolwork or ability to engage meaningfully in university experiences. First-year engineering instructors often manage these anxieties in their classrooms and, potentially, in advising capacities. Advisors, staff, and university administrators also play a crucial role in supporting students to manage anxieties throughout their academic journeys. Understanding what these anxieties are and how they change throughout the first year supports instructors and advisors to better support first-year engineering students via class content and formal or informal advising interactions. The need to explore first-year engineering students’ anxieties motivates our exploration of the following research questions:

How do first-year engineering students describe their anxieties?

How do these reported anxieties change from the start to the end of their first year, if at all?

Background: The transition from high school to the first year of college is fraught with challenges that students must navigate. Students must balance academic, social, professional, and self-regulation tasks in a new and likely unfamiliar environment. Each category of task comes with expectations, both internal and external, that students use to judge their own progress and performance. The thought of failing to achieve these expectations produces anxieties variable in both source and intensity for many students. Coupled with a lack of preparation or training in help-seeking behaviors, students often struggle to attend to or overcome their concerns. Engineering students in particular may be more reluctant to seek help. Further, the broader culture of engineering perpetuates ideas of elitism and meritocracy that discourage help-seeking. A substantial body of literature examining the negative consequences of anxiety underscores the importance of understanding both the sources of students’ anxieties and how instructors and administrators alike can best support them.

Methods: First-year engineering students in a two-semester introductory engineering course sequence at a large public Mid-Atlantic research-intensive university took a survey at two time points: once in the beginning of the fall semester and again at the end of the spring semester. The survey addressed a range of topics, but this study focuses on the qualitative answer to the question, “What's your biggest source of anxiety, at this stage in your studies?” The written responses to this question were inductively coded by both authors individually. Codes were compared and a shared codebook was developed. These codes emerge themes related to the variety of personal and academic anxieties experienced by first-year engineering students. Pre-post comparisons of the patterns in codes and pair-wise comparison of codes applied to individual students reveal both macro-scale and student-specific shifts in reported anxieties.

Anticipated Results: Initial findings reveal that students primarily report being anxious about their grades and getting a job. While not explicitly asked about academic anxieties, students may have reported more academic-related anxieties than personal or social anxieties that they may be facing, due to the context of the survey. We anticipate that results from this study will reveal trends in first-year engineering students’ anxieties and the ways that they shift over a school year. We anticipate that these results will seem obvious to those who interact with first-year engineering students but assert that this study will provide research-based evidence on this topic that promotes action. These insights will enable first-year engineering instructors, advisors, staff, and administrators to better support students both in the classroom and in formal or informal advising settings. Results from this study will provide an overview of general concerns of first-year students and may also reveal specific institutional hurdles that may incite undue anxieties in the engineering student experience. These hurdles may bear additional consideration.