PhD’ing While Black: Unpacking the Emotions of Navigating Engineering as a Black Student and the Implications for Mental Health

Introduction: Mental health has become an emergent issue across the United States, especially with respect to graduate students. Graduate students are often faced with a wide variety of academic, professional, and personal challenges across their academic journeys that can impact their persistence in their graduate programs. In their study of graduate student mental health, Hyun, Quinn, Madon, and Lustig demonstrated that many graduate students express negative emotional responses to stress that impact their wellbeing and academic performance. Black graduate students in engineering deal with additional scrutiny, such as microaggressions, racism, and other racialized experiences throughout their journey. These challenges often exacerbate the effects of negative emotional responses, especially when aspects of their identity threatened. The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of Black graduate students in engineering and the emotions associated with those experiences, addressing the research questions: What are the emotions associated with navigating engineering as described by Black graduate students? What might be implications for Black graduate student mental health based on the emotions described? Theoretical Framework: This work is anchored in Linnenbrick-Garcia and Pekrun's Circumplex Model of Affect framework, where emotions are categorized according to the intersection of affect and activation. Affective states, or dimensions of valence, are emotions or moods and can be described as positive (or pleasant) or as negative (or unpleasant). Activation refers to energy, or stimulation, and can be expressed cognitively and/or physiologically. Using the Circumplex Model of Affect provides insight to the valence and activation of emotions which will enable a deeper insight into the emotions experienced. Situated in knowledge that negative affect, high activation emotions contribute to cognitive overload, which directly impacts mental health, learning more about experiences of Black students navigating engineering and their associated emotions could add to our understanding of macrolevel influences in their experiences while identifying opportunities to better support Black students' success through structures, policies, and resources. Methods: This study adopted narrative interview methods to capture the lived experiences of Black graduate students in engineering with a focus on identifying the emotions associated with their stories. The inclusion criteria for this study required participants identify as Black, be enrolled in an accredited doctoral engineering program, and have engaged in either the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and/or Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) as an undergraduate student. A total of 5 individuals (Female, n= 3; Male, n= 2) participated in this study. Emotion coding was used for the first-cycle coding method in efforts to capture both the explicit and implicit emotions expressed in participants' narrative recounts of their experiences in engineering. Emotion coding uses an inductive approach to apply emotions to excerpts as participants describe their experience. Aspects such as tone, verbiage and expressions were used to identify emotions that were not directly verbally communicated. Between the first and second cycle of coding, the technique of code mapping was utilized to categorize the raw emotions from the stories into appropriate categories as a means of organizing similar data. The research team reviewed and coded the transcripts and then discussed the code applications collectively to confer on agreement regarding the code application and interpretation of the emotions. Finally, the Circumplex Model of Affect was applied as a structural coding technique to properly classify the emotion categories with respect to activation energy (high or low) and valence (positive or negative). Once the emotions were classified, the stimuli surrounding the emotions were analyzed and themes were presented regarding the emotional navigation of engineering for Black graduate students. Findings: The findings of this study demonstrated engineering to be experienced in unique ways depending on the settings and student involved, which ultimately led to variable perspectives and expressions of emotions across the participants. Across all of the participant stories, there was a plethora of emotions expressed both explicitly and implicitly. A total of 44 distinct emotions were identified across the experiences of the participants, which were then separated into four categories via the Circumplex Model: (+,+)*, high-activation with positive valence (8), (-,+)*, low-activation with positive valence (8), (+,-)*, high-activation with negative valence (17), and (-,-)*, low-activation with negative valence (11). Negative valence emotions were more prevalent across the stories of the Black engineering graduate students, accounting for over 60% of the emotions identified in their stories. And more, when activation energy and affect are simultaneously considered, the number of high-activation, negative affect emotions greatly outweigh the number of low activation, negative affect emotions. Discussion and Implications: This study explores the range of emotions that Black graduate students experience while navigating engineering academic environments. We found the greatest frequency of emotions to be those categorized as high activation, negative affect, the most negatively impactful of the categorized emotions. Enduring high-activation, negative emotions over time can have implications for anxiety, depression and other mental health concerns, due to their high energy cost. While researchers have explored the effect of emotions for the general engineering population, Black engineering doctoral students navigate engineering spaces unlike their majoritarian counterparts. The disaggregation of these stories helps to elucidate the lived emotions of these students, and how they differ based on their perceptions of the experience This study warrants continued investigation into emotions and their link to mental health for Black engineering graduate students. Consideration of mental health is critical and rooted in effective efforts to broaden participation in engineering, which rests in better understanding of Black students' experiences in engineering as reflective of its normalized culture. At the core of these efforts is the goal of promoting accountability through the elucidation of opportunities for macrolevel structures to support and provide what is needed for all students' success. This could include revisiting institutional policies, incorporating sensitivity training goals for faculty, and further investigation into student and faculty interactions. Future work will involve discussion of the greater implications of how these emotions impact students' mental health and trajectories as well as deeper investigation of the critical incidents eliciting significant emotional responses.