The Academic Community and Extracurricular Participation in the Professional Formation of Engineering Students

This study examines extracurricular participation within a broader conceptual view of the academic community as an environment for the professional formation of engineering students. We conducted a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 898 engineering and technical students at Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University, Russian Federation; 284 respondents were current participants in extracurricular activities and 614 were non-participants. We compared self-reported academic achievement between these groups and examined how characteristics of participation were related to study-specific indicators of professional readiness, academic engagement, self-organization, academic anxiety, academic burnout, and grade point average (GPA). Participants reported an additional examination session less often than non-participants (22.9% vs. 34.0%; χ2 = 10.870; p = 0.001), and the seven-category GPA distribution also differed between the groups (χ2(6) = 25.889; p < 0.001). Among participants, stronger professional orientation of extracurricular activity was associated with higher professional readiness (r = 0.357), academic engagement (r = 0.223), and self-reported GPA (r = 0.171), as well as lower academic anxiety (r = −0.233) and academic burnout (r = −0.230). Its association with self-organization was not statistically significant. These results describe correlational patterns in the extracurricular component of the proposed academic community framework; they neither establish causal effects nor validate the framework as a complete system-level model.