Abstract, Intro, and Methods

Abstract

Understanding the correlation between time spent inside and outside engineering and how that can affect stress levels is important because engineering students are among the most stressed out of all majors. Everyone is different and will become stressed over varying things and situations.

Introduction

               College students no matter their major and how much they are doing in and outside of school will inevitably become stressed because of their course work. Stress in unavoidable for college students, but the amount of stress can be different from person to person and can be caused by many different outside factors. Current research shows that most of the stressors for college students aren’t academic and are from outside sources like family and social problems. In one study it was found that out of 100 students “38% of the stressors were intrapersonal, 28% environmental, 19% interpersonal, and 15% academic” and while academic was the lowest, it was not to discredit the stress from academics because 81.1% of the stressors could be found as daily hassles (Heckert, Niebling, Ross, 1999, p. 312). This study helps the understanding that everyone’s situation is different and have varying stress based on their situation.

               The largest parts of stress and college students are how well they are performing academically because stress can either motivate of debilitate depending on the situation and time management. These two things are the most talked about when on the topic of college student stress. Performance and time management are shown in many studies to have a very strong correlation and “even students that who reported more frequent use of time management were expected to show higher levels of performance” (Macan, Shahani, Dipboye, Phillips p.761). Stress was also found to be negatively correlated with time management and tended to alleviate as more time management was self-reported by the students (Misra, McKean). Time management has been seen to affect many aspects of one’s life, specifically their stress and “persons indicating that they engaged more frequently in the mechanics of time management… reported… higher GPAs, higher self-ratings of performance, and higher satisfaction with life” (Macan, Shahani, Dipboye, Phillips p.765). With all these things being self-reported to be higher the more time management that took place, it can be assumed from the correlation between stress and those mentioned things that the stress of the reported people was relatively low.

Methods

Participants:

Those who took part in this study were engineering students from many different colleges across the United States. The ages of the participants were anyone from their 1^st year to their 5^th year in their colleges respective engineering program. The total number of people to take this survey was TO BE DETERMINED people.

Procedure:

The engineering students were asked to complete a short, anonymous, 5 question survey to determine how their use of their time affected their stress. The first questions asks the participants as to what their respective major was and the answers were several common engineering majors. The second question asks what year in school they are, and the choices were year 1-5. The third question asks how much time is spent within engineering and gives several choices as to how many hours are spent per week. The fourth question asks how much time is spent outside of engineering and again gives options on how many hours a week they spend outside of engineering. The fifth question asks how much stress they usually feel on any given day and they must answer on a scale 1- 10, 10 being the worse.

Data Analysis:

When analyzing the data, it was important to see that some questions such were meant solely to get demographic information that could possibly clear things up but weren’t necessary for the research. The correlations of how time was spent by engineering students and their stress levels were the main point of the data and the rest was used strictly context of the data and to give the data some depth.