Out of all students on campus, I believe that Engineering students have the toughest time of all. As an engineering student myself, I have some bias on how the workload of engineering students is impacting our physical and mental health. Knowing this, I decided to look around for fellow engineering students, each of different majors from each other to see what their opinions were on their physical and mental health were like.

I wanted to know first of how others were in their physical health. What I expected was an even split of well managed students who managed their time well and paid attention to their health while the other half were barely managing to stay awake. From my results however, out of the seven people I interviewed, all seven said that their physical health has suffered greatly. Andrew Brown, a mechanical engineer states, “The large workload from studying math to physics lab sessions has contributed greatly in reducing my sleep and increasing my exhaustion.” Upon closer inspection, I could see how much the exhaustion affected their bodies. The bags under their eyes were huge, some moved sluggishly and yawned all the time. As Kyle Kirby, a civil engineer states, “College is figuratively and literally killing me, the stress from all of the work and my higher than average blood pressure has caused me to have mini heart attacks.” Seeing how their physical health was so low, I felt as though their mental health would follow the same decline.

Since a decrease in physical health was present, I had a hunch that their mental health would follow the same route. And once again, all seven of the people I interviewed stated that their mental health has dropped since the start of college. Most of us joked about how much our mental health was suffering but some honestly felt as though their mental health was almost 0. Justin Bell, a computer engineer like myself stated, “I feel as though I am losing my charge constantly and never gaining it back.” When asked what he meant, Justin compared his mental health to a battery where his mental capacity was fully charged in the beginning but is draining over time and never recovering. Justin then went into more detail as to how our physical health is decreasing over time from constant usage, just like a computer board. From all this information, I felt as though I had finally found the answer I was looking for.

This experience has shown me that I am not the only one suffering from the challenging task known as college. For an engineering student, the large workload from all their classes has caused large amounts of stress which has negatively affected their physical and mental health. From this however, I met many people who shared the same pain as myself and bonded with a few of them. I learned of ways to help my fellow engineers deal with the constant stress and taxing nights of work. I hope that I can find other engineers who are trying their best to survive through this with the newly found information of our physical and mental health problems.