The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 virus affected learning across the nation. Institutions evacuated campuses due to the virus, and university students were forced to return home and transition to online education. E-learning was challenging, especially for STEM students, as many of them struggled to maintain good STEM learning and performance. In addition, mental health remained a concern. As part of a larger nationwide research project investigating decision making processes in undergraduate STEM students, the purpose of this research is to investigate the mental health experiences of STEM students during COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting purposive sampling and the constructivist Charmaz Grounded Theory method, one-hour ZOOM interviews were used obtain narrations of COVID related experiences from 63 STEM students in six different U.S. institutions. MS Excel was utilized for coding, categorization, and constant comparative analysis.
Preliminary results from eight interviews indicated that research participants experienced unique stresses from various events that impacted their mental health, and ultimately impacted their STEM learning experiences and performance. Mental health triggers were coded as burnout, isolation, physical illness, mental illness, heavy workload, family, hard on self, and lack of resources. Mental health triggers cause declining mental health, learning challenges, stresses, and lower STEM performance. Personal adaptation decisions included exercising, healthy diets, family time, self-leniency, self-reward, environment redecoration, sleep, break, friend time, journaling, and meditation. These adaptation strategies were effective in improving mental health and reducing learning challenges and stresses. In conclusion, good adaptation decisions are likely to improve mental health, as well as STEM learning and performance. Early identification of mental health triggers can accelerate the implementation of effective interventions to maintain mental health and STEM performance during future pandemics. Future research will focus on quantifying effect of mental health triggers on STEM performance.