Comparative Analysis of Academic Stress, Emotional Strength, and Institutional Support Across Academic Disciplines: A Psychodynamic Perspective on Freshmen Adjustment

The authors examine the variations in coping, support and stress in the first-year students (n = 200) across psychology, engineering, business, humanities and science courses. Results indicate that the academic stress of students is most influenced on engineering and science students with the humanities students being more emotionally susceptible. Resilience and successful academic performance are more prevalent in business students but psychology students need to employ emotional intuition and help-seeking conduct to cope. Strong positive relationships were found between institutional support systems especially peer mentoring and academic advising and GPA and wellbeing. The findings indicate the importance of the discipline-sensitive support models that involve the integration of emotional resiliency training and academic counselling to enhance adaptation rates in the first year.