Why do some engineering students study alone?

This paper looks at undergraduate engineering students who have solitary study habits and do not frequently engage with classmates. These students, referred to as `academic solitaries,' explicitly state that they do not interact or study much with their academic peers and may find a sense of belonging elsewhere. Using a mixed methods approach (including interviews with students and surveys), our data show that while some students are happy studying alone and do so by choice (`preferred solitaires'), others universally express feeling like an outsider and study alone as a result (`outsider solitaries'). We argue that many of these outsider solitaries may be at risk of dropping out or changing fields over short, moderate, or long-term time scales. As part of our mixed methods study, we have identified a unifying set of indicators that can be obtained by survey at much lower self-select bias than recruiting students for interviews. We found that this approach allows greater success in identifying outsider solitaries at potential risk of dropping out. In this pilot study, we show that using these affective indicators in survey form can potentially allow practitioners to identify students at risk of dropping out long before they reach the point of leaving.