2022 Spring Asee Middle Atlantic Section Conference. 2022Recent research has emphasized that the collective experiences of the pandemic have influenced not only how students spend their time but have also impacted students’ fundamental relationship with time itself. The present study is based on a large-scale survey, distributed to students (n=396) enrolled in two introductory engineering courses at a large, public research-intensive university, The Pennsylvania State University, in the northeastern United States during the Fall 2021 semester. Students were asked to respond to a series of open-ended questions asking them to articulate changes in how they spent their time compared to before, during, and (approaching) the end of the global COVID-19 pandemic. A team of coders then reviewed the students’ responses and coded them for review. The present study results suggest that many students have experienced fundamental shifts in their use, perception, and orientation towards social, academic, and personal time. Furthermore, the results from this study also suggest that these effects were neither universally experienced nor evenly distributed by all students. Our findings provide support for the notion that student time management is best framed as an optimization problem that students and faculty inherently view differently. By reconceptualizing the student time management question in this new light, new avenues for improving engineering education practice open, particularly with respect to the development of more inclusive and equitable teaching practices.