Ciencia Puerto Rico

For the past year, I have been researching ways to study stress and assess its impact on academic performance and persistence in students. Stress is a multifactorial phenomenon that is revealed through psychological, biological and physiological responses to a challenging event. As more and more of our nation suffers from mental and emotional disorders associated with stress, it will be important to isolate how and what stress factors contribute to academic attrition, drop-out and lack of success in scientific and engineering disciplines of study. Stress manifests itself in different ways that can lead to the deterioration of one’s ability to perform, succeed, and persist academically. Thus, it is important to tackle at its core, the issue of stress in order to develop potential solutions and strategies to this persisting problem.