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Faculty advisors play an integral role in the experiences of graduate students. Advisors serve in many different capacities for doctoral students: teachers, career guides, research mentors, and more. However, especially in engineering disciplines, faculty advisors often receive little to no training on how to serve as effective mentors. The training that faculty may receive is oftentimes lacking in how to provide psychosocial support, which is an important part of developing psychological safety in a team. A psychologically safe environment is one where an individual feels safe to be themselves and take risks without fear of negative consequences. In graduate engineering education, psychologically safe research environments enable students to be creative and innovative, which is a necessary part of the research process. The impact that psychological safety has on graduate students’ work outcomes and mental health and well-being needs to be more deeply explored to best support students throughout their degree programs and beyond. Psychological safety in a graduate student-advisor relationship can have positive or negative effects on student mental health and well-being as well as learning outcomes. We posit that faculty advisors serve as a resource to students and in turn influence psychological safety in student research environments, which impacts student outcomes. This paper is an update on an NSF RFE project started in 2023 that leverages mixed methods to combine a survey of graduate engineering students and two sets of interviews. We use Conservation of Resources theory to examine psychological safety in relationships between doctoral engineering students and their research advisor(s). We have completed data collection and begun analysis of the survey responses and the first set of interviews. The survey was completed by 469 doctoral engineering students across two R1 institutions. Results indicated that psychological safety was a mediator between mentoring skills and student mental health and well-being and work outcomes. Twenty-eight survey participants were invited to participate in explanatory interviews. Nineteen participants completed an explanatory interview during which they provided insights and additional context into answers they had provided on the survey. Participants were selected to stratify demographics and offer a broad range of advisor experiences. Interviewers provided participants with their responses to survey items and asked them why they selected the answer they did or for any examples of times when their survey response was representative or not of their overall advising relationship. Explanatory interview findings emphasized the variability of student experiences with advisor mentorship and related work outcomes. Additional narrative interviews are currently being conducted with participants who had previously completed the survey. These narrative interviews are designed to capture specific events and stories from students about critical moments in their relationships with their advisors and how advisor actions (or inaction) in these critical moments impacted their psychological safety and work outcomes, and how these experiences changed over time. We intend to interview 10-15 participants from the larger study in Fall 2024. Collectively, these results will inform training for faculty advising graduate students to create psychologically safe environments where students will thrive. 

It is well-known that a significant population of doctoral students drop out of their graduate programs and face or develop significant mental health distress. Stress plays a role in exacerbating mental health distress in both engineering PhD programs and more broadly for university students in general. While rates of dropout for engineering students may not differ strongly from other disciplines, engineering students have been suggested to be less likely to seek help from university services for well-being concerns. In the first year of our three‐year NSF RFE project, we interviewed doctoral engineering students to identify major stressors present in the doctoral engineering experience at the present study’s focal institution. In the second year of our project, we had developed the Stressors for Doctoral Students Questionnaire - Engineering (SDSQ-E), a novel survey which measures the frequency and severity of these top sources of stress for doctoral engineering students. The SDSQ-E was designed using the results of first year interviews and a review of the literature on stress for doctoral engineering students. In year three, we completed analysis of the year 3 data and conducted further testing of the SDSQ-E. We also developed a discipline-general form of the survey, called the SDSQ-G. In October-December 2023, we administered these surveys to engineering PhD students as a subset of a large sample of graduate students at two institutions. Further, we tested the potential for the SDSQ-E to predict factors such as anxiety, depression, or intention to persist in doctoral programs. We broadly summarize these survey distributions including tests of the SDSQ-E for validity, fairness, and reliability. 

Doctoral students experience high rates of mental health distress and dropout; however, the mental health and wellness of engineering doctoral students is understudied. Studies of student persistence, wellness, and success often aggregate fields together, such as by studying all engineering students. Thus, little work has considered the experiences of biomedical engineering (BME) doctoral students, despite differences between doctoral BME research, course content, and career expectations compared with other engineering disciplines. In this qualitative interview case study, we explore stressors present in the BME graduate experience that are unique from engineering students in other disciplines. Methods We analyzed a longitudinal interview study of doctoral engineering students across four timepoints within a single academic year, consisting of a subsample (n=6) of doctoral students in a BME discipline, among a larger sample of engineering doctoral students (N=55). BME students in the sample experienced some themes generated from a larger thematic analysis differently compared with other engineering disciplines. These differences are presented and discussed, grounded in a model of workplace stress. Results BME participants working in labs with biological samples expressed a lack of control over the timing and availability of materials for their research projects. BME participants also had more industry-focused career plans and described more commonly coming to BME graduate studies from other fields (e.g., another engineering major) and struggling with the scope and content of their introductory coursework. A common throughline for the stressors was the impact of the interdisciplinary nature of BME programs, to a greater extent compared with other engineering student experiences in our sample. Conclusions We motivate changes for researchers, instructors, and policymakers which specifically target BME students and emphasize the importance of considering studies at various unit levels (university department level vs college level vs full institution) when considering interventions targeting student stress and wellness. 

A psychologically safe environment is characterized by people who feel safe to voice ideas and concerns, willingly seek feedback, have positive intentions to one another, engage in constructive confrontation, and feel safe to take risks and experiment. Outside of academia, psychological safety has been shown to impact creativity, work performance, and work engagement. In academic research environments, faculty have a major leadership role in cultivating a psychologically safe environment amongst their academic research teams. Effective graduate student mentoring, which includes both career and psychosocial support, is critical to the development and retention of talented engineers in the US workforce. There is a need to better understand how engineering departments can cultivate more inclusive, psychologically safe environments in which graduate students feel safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking, especially in research settings. Guided by the Conservation of Resources theory, this project aims to address the following research question: What are the relationships between faculty advisor mentoring, doctoral student psychological safety, and the subsequent positive and negative outcomes for doctoral students? This work in progress paper presents the first quantitative phase of an explanatory mixed methods research design within the overarching project. The quantitative phase will address the following research aims: 1) Identify relationships between mentorship, psychological safety, and engineering doctoral student mental health, 2) Identify mentoring competencies that are predictive of research group psychological safety, and 3) Identify how different demographics experience mentoring and psychological safety in their research groups. Researchers developed a survey consisting of five pre-existing scales, four open-ended questions, and demographics questions. The scales include dyadic and team psychological safety, mentoring competency, mental health and well-being, and job stress. The survey was reviewed by graduate students outside of the participant pool at multiple institutions as well as an external advisory board panel and revised to improve clarity and ensure the selection of appropriate subscales. The survey will be administered via Qualtrics. Graduate students who have been enrolled in their doctoral program for at least one year and currently have a doctoral research advisor will be recruited to participate in the survey at four public, research-intensive institutions. The planned target sample size is 200-300 graduate students. This paper will present the design of the survey and preliminary survey results. As the first part of a larger mixed-methods study, the survey responses provide insight into graduate level engineering education and how doctoral students can be better supported.