The Environments We Create: How Engineering Culture Shapes Student Mental Health and Support
Mental health concerns on college campuses are of increasing concern. Within engineering, research has increasingly focused on characterizing student mental health and understanding the influence of engineering culture on well-being and help seeking. Our recent work has shown that engineering students report comparatively low levels of depression and anxiety symptoms relative to students in many other disciplines, despite the high levels of stress associated with engineering education. At the same time, engineering students experiencing mental health distress are among the least likely to have received professional help. Together, these findings raise questions about how engineering culture may shape how students recognize and interpret distress and decide when their experiences warrant support.
Through this talk, I will present results from quantitative, qualitative, and participatory research examining engineering student mental health and help seeking within the broader context of engineering culture. Across studies, expectations surrounding academic performance, productivity, endurance, and self-reliance emerged as important influences on how students understand and respond to mental health concerns. Our qualitative work demonstrates how these norms are communicated and reinforced through everyday educational environments, including interactions with peers, faculty, and advisors.
These findings have led our research toward examining how we might change the environments in which these experiences occur. Through participatory research, we partnered with engineering students to identify barriers to mental health and belonging and develop actionable strategies for change. Students identified opportunities that distribute responsibility across students, faculty, educational practices, support structures, and institutional environments. Together, this work highlights opportunities to move beyond changing individual student behavior toward creating engineering environments that better support mental health and sustainable success.
Bio: Sarah Wilson is an associate professor in Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University. Guided by the motto, “We can’t design better systems until we care about the people inside them,” her research focuses on understanding and improving mental health and well-being in engineering. Her work examines how engineering culture and educational environments shape students’ experiences of mental health, help seeking, and belonging, with a particular focus on the roles of peers, faculty, and broader systems of support. She uses quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods to understand these experiences and partner with students in identifying opportunities for change across the engineering ecosystem. Wilson has co-developed internationally presented workshops on supporting mental health in engineering and collaborates with students, faculty, and institutions to create more inclusive and caring engineering environments. She received the Ray W. Fahien Award from ASEE for innovation in chemical engineering education. While at the University of Kentucky, she supported the development of an NSF-funded Engineering Wellness Center focused on student mental health, help seeking, and belonging.