A mental health survey to be conducted on engineering students

Following on from the survey’s recent grant of ethical approval, a strategic leader in the School of Engineering at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Jo-Anne Tait, is requesting for engineering students from all levels to come forward and participate in an anonymous, online questionnaire, as part of her PhD on the on the mental well being of engineering students. The purpose of the survey is to analyse the mental health of UK engineering students, and to collect information in order to create interview questions for volunteers who choose to participate in future interviews.

Ms Tait stated: “I’ve worked with engineering students for fifteen years in a teaching and pastoral role and I had noticed that engineering students rarely sought advice for mental health and wellbeing issues from their personal tutors or the student support departments. This is despite the majority of engineering students being in potentially higher risk groups. Having done an initial scoping review of literature in this area, I discovered that engineering students don’t really appear much, other than as a comparator for other subjects. There are calls for engineering education reform to meet the needs of industry four point zero, but we appear to be missing personal development and resilience from our curricula or rely on group projects to enhance soft skills. In the future our engineers will need to be more agile than ever and for this we need them to be far more self-aware.”