Concerns for student mental health have grown over the last decade, particularly within engineering disciplines, which are often associated with heavy workloads and difficult assessment. There is subsequently an increasing need to understand the stressors that impact engineering students, and the ways in which we can support them to thrive.
In this episode we speak to Karin Jensen, an Assistant Professor and Faith Gacheru a first-year graduate student, both from the University of Michigan. Karin was awarded a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on undergraduate mental health in engineering programs and recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by US President Biden in January 2025, whilst Faith recently presented a poster entitled A Mixed-Methods Study to Support Undergraduate Engineering Student Well-Being at ASEE 2025.
Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn about stressors within engineering education and ways by which to encourage help-seeking behaviour.
Timestamps
0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode
0.23 Podcast Intro
0.45 Experiences with student mental health from Natalie and Neil
2.32 Introduction to Karin and Faith
7.06 University of Michigan
9.38 Key definitions, terminology and use of language
15.27 How concerns regarding mental health have changed
20.11 The role of engineering culture
24.21 Making changes at different levels of the system
26.32 Measuring stress and identifying stressors within engineering education
34.53 How do educators perceive mental health concerns
36.51 Thriving
38.09 Translating finding into teaching practices
47.21 How is the research being used to support other educators
48.29 Staff mental health
51.09 Future work
52.33 Takeaways from Karin and Faith
55.54 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil
Resources
Details about Karin’s lab and work can be found here https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/ including The Engineering Stress Culture (ESC) Scale, a 10-item measure of undergraduate student perceptions of engineering stress culture and The Undergraduate Engineering Stressors Questionnaire (U-ESQ) (https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/research-well-being/)
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