The Key Of Academic Success – Different Keys To Different Faculties

Developing a strong skill set is crucial for engineering students to succeed in the job market and throughout their entire academic journey. Studies showed the importance of positive psychological factors that can affect students’ success or drop out from their studies. First-year students face several challenges when transitioning from high school, pushing universities to look for the possible factors affecting such decisions to address it better, considering the differences between each field of study. This research aims to confirm the set of positive psychological factors, including emotional intelligence, that would predict the dropping out and success of students in different faculties. First-year students of the economics and social science, engineering, and natural science faculty answered psychological questionnaires in 2020 and 2021. The questionnaire includes coping styles, personality traits, psychological immune system, emotional intelligence, PERMA factors (P—positive emotion, E—engagement, R—relationships, M—meaning, A—accomplishments), and GRIT. Machine learning XGBoost was used for the analysis. Results confirmed the existence of different impacting factors depending on the faculty. The only common factor between faculties was the psychological immunity feeling of growth attribute, which showed the opposite importance for social and economics students and engineering and natural science students. The results allow universities to consider these factors for dropout and success for first-year engineering and non-engineering students.