Long COVID: Elucidating the Impact of COVID-19 on Black Male Engineering Students- Highlighting Their Resilient Assets

Long COVID: Elucidating the Impact of COVID-19 on Black Male Engineering Students- Highlighting their Resilient Assets

Authors: Fatima Elmouden, Erik Hines, Jared Davis, Tyron Slack, Le Shorn Benjamin, Jerrod Henderson

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had a widespread effect on university students, and accompanying it was the social unrest following the murder of George Floyd (e.g., dual pandemic). From the shutdown of university campuses nationwide to the switch from in-person to online teaching, the impacts of these sudden changes have been studied on a general and university-to-university basis. Despite the proliferation of studies highlighting the effects of the dual pandemic on students, fewer have foregrounded the experiences of Black men in engineering undergraduate programs and how they experienced these phenomena. Yet Black men constitute a missing segment of the population who could contribute to the global engineering knowledge economy (Burt et al., 2019). Therefore, in this study, we aimed to investigate how Black male engineering students experienced these two phenomena to understand better how to support Black men’s success in engineering. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 Black male engineering students. The guiding framework for this study was alienation and engagement. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed three themes: (1) feelings of alienation, (2) student response to alienation, and (3) resilient reintegration. Though participants reported setbacks due to the effect of the pandemic and social unrest on their academic pursuits, they also reported an unwavering ability to adapt and reframe those setbacks in positive ways that allowed them to push forward.