Characterizing Engineering Graduate Students' Longitudinal Stress Landscapes and Stressor Cascades

The purpose of this full research paper is to characterize the distinct stressors that engineering graduate students face during their time as students. While recent studies have pointed to broad categories of concern, such as student isolation, departmental practices, time, and advising, most studies are qualitative, limiting insights into the impact of stressors on the engineering graduate student population as a whole. Furthermore, these broad-scope issues make it challenging for university leaders to identify potential points of intervention. Recently, increased attention has been drawn to how structural influences from institutions may generate additional stressors or hinder a graduate student's ability to effectively navigate common issues. Therefore, the goals of this study are to categorize and quantify the prevalence of stressors faced by engineering graduate students. To meet these aims, we collected longitudinal data from 143 engineering graduate students over 17 weeks and coded then analyzed stressors using descriptive statistics to quantify the prevalence of discrete stressors in the population. Results indicate that the most common critical events are stressors related to Graduate student issues, Coursework, Advisor Issues, Lab Equipment and Experiments, Publications, Prelim/Quals, and health and wellbeing. Furthermore, we found that graduate students are likely to experience chronic stress with critical stressor events occurring between 17.65% and 47.06% of the. Since graduate students have limited resources to aid in navigating stressors, it is common for stressors to cascade from one another. This work highlights the existence of systemic issues and the necessity of preventative rather than reactive measures to support student success and well-being.