Undergraduate Students' Struggles in Computer Science
Computing Education Research (CER) has made valuable contributions to improving undergraduate computing. CER tends to focus on instructional challenges, developing tools or techniques for teaching, or researching a single institution or classroom experience and sometimes may lack a student-first perspective. To identify if there were student concerns that current research was overlooking, we designed an open-ended survey that asked undergraduate computing students what struggles they experienced and how they solved or coped with those struggles. This paper reports on this survey with $N=201$ responses from 45 US institutions. Our analysis identified two primary factors in student concerns: social/personal and academic/structural. Many of the top concerns of students aligned with trends in CER literature; however, there were issues, particularly those related to structural factors (curriculum, lengthy course content, lack of institutional support, and unenthusiastic or uninterested professors), that have little representation in CER literature. Many of these issues may have temporal context, suggesting ongoing data collection from students may help identify appropriate directions and trends for CER. Students also related ways they navigate these issues with social support systems and academic resources, which emphasize the importance of providing students with strong academic/personal support. While we know students struggle in many ways, this survey provides evidence that further research in areas that are pressing today may be under-addressed.