This prospective study examined student self-esteem and persistence during the first 2 years of an undergraduate program in engineering. The authors hypothesized that individuals who define the self in terms of close relationships, termed the interdependent self-construal, will experience a sense of misfit in the competitive engineering environment but that high levels of social support will mitigate this effect. As expected, for students with a very interdependent self-construal, levels of social support were positively related to changes in self-esteem during the 1st year and predicted continued enrollment in engineering at the end of the 2nd year, controlling for previous academic performance and self-efficacy. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of the self-construal in behavior and for increasing the supply of well-trained engineers are discussed.
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