Assessing students’ well-being in engineering’s ‘culture of hardship’

While mental health concerns are prevalent at colleges across the country, engineering majors are particularly likely to report poor mental health. Justin C. Major, Ph.D., an assistant professor of experiential engineering education at Rowan University, attributes this trend to the culture of the discipline. 

“Engineering is known for its culture of hardship,” Major said. “I have heard students at various institutions call engineering a culture of shared crying. Students build a sense of belonging through feelings of this shared experience.” 

These students’ mental health struggles can make them question whether they belong in the notoriously challenging discipline. This culture of difficulty often pushes out students who question whether they have the resources to succeed, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. But Major suggests steps can be taken to create a culture of thriving instead.

With a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s EDU Core Research program, Major will explore students’ well-being and career perceptions in the context of engineering culture. Supported with a combined $1.25 million in NSF funding for their work, he and collaborator Karin Jensen, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, will interview engineering students at all levels of undergraduate study at both institutions to better understand students’ conceptualizations of mental health at different points in their education. The researchers will gain longitudinal insights by following a group of first-year students throughout their undergraduate education and into their first careers in the field.

“We want to see how engineering culture impacts students’ perceptions about their mental health and their careers,” Major said. “How do students’ mental health and perceptions of their future change over time during their studies and, when they get to that first career, how does it align with their conceptualizations?”

The researchers plan to implement interventions in their own classrooms to get students thinking more about their mental health and engineering careers in tandem. Both graduate students working in Major’s lab and undergraduate students in his junior and senior engineering clinic courses over the next five years will have the opportunity to contribute to this work while thinking more about mental health in relation to their careers. 

Major recalled his own engineering instructors introducing him to the field with an unsettling warning that is common at many institutions: “Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you will be here at the end.” 

“There’s this expectation that you are going to suffer and that suffering is what’s going to get you an engineering degree,” Major said. “But that’s not what we should be teaching our students.”

Major believes an engineering education that emphasizes thriving will lead to greater student success, a concept already adopted by the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering: “Look to your left. Look to your right. The three of you will be together at graduation.”

“Having critical conversations about mental health is a way to push back on this culture of hardship,” Major said. “Instead of continuing to push these narratives of suffering to the next generation of engineers, we can create a culture of thriving that supports students.” 

Major notes that success looks different to different people but can include having better mental health and a better work-life balance.

“By focusing on thriving and thinking about our well-being, everybody has a more equitable chance of succeeding in engineering,” Major said.