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1. From Mind Full to Mindful: Proposing Mindfulness as a Proactive Strategy for Safeguarding Mental Health in Engineering Education.

   Tran, Vanessa; McCall, Cassandra; Secules, Stephen; Kali, Maimuna Begum; Van_Dyke, Gabriel (June 2024, ASEE PEER Document Repository)

   Engineering students are increasingly reporting struggles with stress and mental health challenges during their undergraduate careers, yet most will only consider seeking support once they have reached a significant state of distress. While university campuses are increasingly establishing mental well-being centers and support structures for students, these efforts are reactionary and require student engagement outside the classroom. Mindfulness, a well-recognized mental health intervention, has shown significant promise as a preventive strategy that fosters a culture that prioritizes well-being in educational settings. This intervention offers many benefits for students beyond mental health, including improved focus, emotional regulation, stress reduction, enhanced cognitive performance, and overall well-being. Despite the growing need for such interventions, the adoption of mindfulness as a practice in engineering education remains limited. This paper proposes mindfulness as a proactive strategy for safeguarding students’ mental health in engineering education. Specifically, we draw from existing literature to dive into the benefits and potential feasibility of incorporating mindfulness into daily engineering curricula. By equipping engineering students to manage stress, we can better promote their overall well-being as students and as emerging career professionals, aiming to foster healthier engineering communities and workplace environments. 

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2. From Mind Full to Mindful: Proposing Mindfulness as a Proactive Strategy for Safeguarding Mental Health in Engineering Education

   Tran, V; McCall, C; Secules, S; Kali, M B; Van_Dyke, G (June 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   Engineering students are increasingly reporting struggles with stress and mental health challenges during their undergraduate careers, yet most will only consider seeking support once they have reached a significant state of distress. While university campuses are increasingly establishing mental well-being centers and support structures for students, these efforts are reactionary and require student engagement outside the classroom. Mindfulness, a well-recognized mental health intervention, has shown significant promise as a preventive strategy that fosters a culture that prioritizes well-being in educational settings. This intervention offers many benefits for students beyond mental health, including improved focus, emotional regulation, stress reduction, enhanced cognitive performance, and overall well-being. Despite the growing needs for such interventions, the adoption of mindfulness as a practice in engineering education remains limited. In this paper, we propose mindfulness as a proactive strategy for safeguarding mental health in engineering education. Specifically, we draw from existing literature to dive into the benefits and potential feasibility of incorporating mindfulness into daily engineering curricula. By equipping engineering students to manage stress, we can better promote their overall well-being as students and as emerging career professionals, with the overarching goal to foster healthier engineering communities and workplace environments. 

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3. Identifying common perceived stressors and stress-relief strategies among undergraduate engineering students

   Ban, N.; Shannon, H.; Wright, C.J.; Miller, M.E.; Hargis, L.E.; Usher, E.L.; Hammer, J.H.; Wilson, S.A. (January 2022, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Mental health concerns have become a growing problem among collegiate engineering students. To date, there has been little research to understand the factors that influence student mental health within this population. Literature on engineering student mental health supports the idea that engineering students experience high levels of mental health distress, which often stems from stressors such as academic workload, maintaining a strong grade point average (GPA), and pressure from parents and/or professors. Of particular concern, distressed engineering students are less likely to seek professional help when compared to students in other majors. As a result, a comprehensive study was conducted on engineering mental health help-seeking behavior. Through secondary analysis of the data from that study, this work aims to identify common perceived stressors that may contribute to mental health distress, as well as perceived coping strategies that may be used instead of seeking professional mental health help. A diverse group of 33 engineering undergraduate students were a part of the comprehensive study on engineering mental health help-seeking behavior. For this study, qualitative data was analyzed to address two specific research questions: 1) What are the main sources of stress that engineers have experienced in their engineering training? and 2) What coping strategies have students developed as an alternative to seeking professional help? Several common perceived stressors were identified including an unsupportive and challenging engineering training environment, challenges in time management, and academic performance expectations. Perceived coping strategies identified include relationships with family, friends, and classmates and health and wellness activities such as exercise, mindfulness, and maintaining spiritual health. The results of this work will be helpful in recognizing ways to improve engineering education and increase student support. 

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4. Engineering Doctoral Students' Interpretations of Stress and Mental Health Experiences in Graduate Education

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342891  

   Parker, Mackenzie C.; Stienhorst, Kiara L.; Feil-Seifer, David; Kirn, Adam (October 2023, IEEE)

   The research paper examines how engineering doctoral students describe their awareness and experiences with stress and mental health during their graduate studies. Despite the known bidirectional relationship between stress and mental health, there is limited research on how engineering doctoral students rationalize the disparity between the health consequences of chronic stress and the veneration of academic endurance in the face of these challenges. Given the dangers of chronic stress to physical and mental health, it is important to understand how students perceive the purpose and impact of stress and mental health within overlapping cultures of normalized stress. We conducted semi-structured interviews to understand participants' awareness, conceptualizations, and interpretations of stress and mental health. The research team analyzed interview transcripts using content analysis with inductive coding. Overall, we found that our participants recognized behavioral changes as an early sign of chronic stress while physical changes were a sign of sustained chronic stress; these cues signaled that participants needed additional support, including social support and campus mental health services. These findings support the need for greater mental health awareness and education within engineering doctoral programs to help students identify and manage chronic stress. 

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5. Trait Mindfulness in an engineering classroom: An exploration of the relationship between mindfulness, academic skills, and professional skills.

   Rieken, B.; Schar, M.; Sheppard, S. (January 2017, Frontiers in Education, October 12-15, Erie, PA.)

   This research explores the intersection of mindfulness and engineering education. Among the reported benefits of mindfulness are enhanced cognitive flexibility, improved concentration, and increased emotional intelligence. These characteristics may be beneficial to engineers as they tackle increasingly complex and interdisciplinary challenges. This research looks at trait mindfulness of 75 students in an introductory engineering course. Results show that mindfulness correlates with business skills self-efficacy (including interpersonal skills) but not with mechanics self-efficacy or final grade. There is also a correlation between mindfulness and the intent to pursue a career in a small company or in an entrepreneurial start-up company. Implications of this research suggest that mindfulness-based classroom activities may help broaden the engineering education experience. (This paper earned the FiE Dasher Best Paper Award.) 

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