Stressed Out: Identifying Inequities and Underlying Causes Associated With Pre-med Student Stress

Abstract

Stress is among the top mental health concerns of US college students and hypothesized to be especially high among pre-med students. Yet, the extent to which pre-meds’ stress differs from other college science students’ stress, as well as the underlying factors contributing to pre-meds’ stress are understudied. Given that stress is disproportionately likely to impact students who are already underrepresented and underserved in science and medicine, it is integral to identify what underlies student stress. Study Objective: We conducted a sequential mixed-methods study to identify what factors exacerbate pre-med stress and the severity of pre-med stress compared to students who are not pre-med. Hypothesis: We hypothesized the competitive nature of being pre-med would account for the majority of pre-med stress and that their overall stress levels would be higher than those of their counterparts. Methods: In Study 1, we conducted an exploratory qualitative interview study with 30 undergraduate pre-meds to assess what aspects of being pre-med exacerbate their stress. We built on this work in Study 2, with a survey of 551 science undergraduates to (a) assess how generalizable the findings from Study 1 were among undergraduate pre-meds at scale and to (b) assess whether students with different career tracks express different levels of stress. Our specific research questions were: 1) On average, do students perceive that pre-meds have higher stress than non-pre-med science majors? 2) Do pre-meds report higher levels of academic stress, perfectionism, social comparison, and perceived competitive environment in science college courses? 3) What aspects of being pre-med induce stress? and 4) What recommendations do pre-meds have for instructors and institutions to decrease pre-med stress? We used open coding methods and regressions to analyze our data. Results: We found that most students perceived that pre-med students had higher stress than their peers. However, while pre-meds reported higher levels of social comparison, they did not express higher academic stress, perfectionism, or perceived competition compared to their peers in science. Regardless of career path, being a woman or non-binary, identifying as a person excluded because of their ethnicity or race (PEER), financially unstable and having a lower GPA significantly predicted a higher academic stress score. Aspects of the medical school application underlying pre-med stress include worrying about not being good enough or maintaining a competitive GPA. Conclusion: This study highlights the levels of stress among pre-meds do not differ compared to non-pre-med science undergraduates, but that women or non-binary students, PEERs, students who are financially unstable and those with lower GPAs are more likely to experience stress in the context of undergraduate science. This work provides student-produced recommendations for ways in which instructors and institutions can decrease the stress associated with being a pre-med student. This study was funded by an ASU Online Undergraduate Research Scholars program seed grant. Graduate student Mohammed is funded by an NSF GRFP #026257-001 and PI Cooper is funded by an NSF CAREER #2143671. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.