The work of education innovation is stressful, challenging, and at times isolating. Through the delivery of a workshop we developed, we create an intimate and brave space to explore our own well-being and thriving using the practices of intention setting, embodiment, and wisdom circles, and facilitate a basic understanding of the neurobiology behind stress, trauma, and learning. In this practice paper, we review the process and literature used to develop the workshop. We share lessons learned from delivering the workshop. These are highlighted to demonstrate the empirical value that this workshop, as a practice, brings to the engineering education community. Based on initial offerings of the workshop, the authors have observed that participants have found the workshop to be a beneficial process that enables them to connect more deeply to themselves and to others within the engineering education community.

The first-year post-secondary experience of engineering students poses an interesting area of inquiry due to the challenges and experiences associated with the transition into a professional degree program. This study aimed to investigate if four psychological variables (perceived stress, student engagement, resilience, and growth mindset) predicted first-year engineering student performance via end-of-first-year grade point average (GPA). An optional online research survey was administered through a mental health and professional skills initiative of the engineering department to undergraduate first-year engineering students. Perceived stress was found to be a significant predictor of GPA. Post-hoc moderation analyses revealed that the relationship between stress and GPA was buffered by resilience (i.e., weaker stress-GPA relationship at higher levels of resilience) and enhanced by student engagement (i.e., stronger stress-GPA relationship at higher levels of engagement). Implications for the importance of resiliency initiatives are discussed, including embedding resiliency skill development within curriculum.

First-year engineering can be an overwhelming experience for students, and it is important to have regular check-in points for students as they transition to post-secondary education. Beginning in 2019, the Schulich School of Engineering (SSE) at the University of Calgary implemented mental wellness and engineering attributes modules across the first-year engineering curriculum. These modules focused on students’ overall development to support their success in the diverse world of engineering. In this paper, we give an overview of the program implementation during 2021-2022 and recommendations for effective implementation of such series based on our experiences. We also briefly present a summary of the students’ self-reflections from the first two years of the program. At the end of each module, we ask students a few open-ended questions to reflect on their experiences based on the materials covered in the module. In addition to these responses from different modules, the final self-reflection, where the students are asked to reflect on their journey as a first-year engineering student, is of immense help in enhancing our understanding of students’ perspectives. Analysis and review of these reflections help mold our strategies for future programming to support student wellbeing and academic and professional development.

National interest in mental wellbeing in the Canadian population has trickled down to focusing on subsets of the population that are particularly vulnerable to poor mental wellbeing. One of these subsets is the engineering student population due to the high stress and anxiety associated with their course load and prospects. The current study carried out a secondary analysis of wellbeing surveys administered to engineering students (N = 141) during the Winter 2020 semester. The primary analysis sought to determine whether perceived peer support, instructor support, and staff support predicted engineering identity. Greater identification with one’s career path is shown to be related with greater wellbeing in students and employees in the form of greater satisfaction and likelihood to remain in the degree program. Further, the analysis explored whether gender and hometown acted as moderating variables, either intensifying or lessening the main relationship. The analysis uncovered a statistically significant relationship between perceived peer support and engineering group identity, r = .534, p <.001. This relationship was moderated by gender, p = .033, wherein female engineering students who reported low levels of peer support were far less likely to feel a sense of belonging in the engineering community than male students. This gender difference did not exist for those who reported high levels of perceived peer support. Implications for female representation and program development are discussed.

First year engineering students begin their degree with pre-conceived notions of how the year will go, with respect to their academics, in addition to their social and spiritual lives. This thereby gives way to a loss of self-efficacy, associated with both engineering itself and their own self-concept led by that initial disconnection. Thus, it is important to understand what factors influence the connections between engineering self-efficacy and their academic, social, and spiritual life-habits. Life habits can be defined as any set of factors encouraging the growth of an individual, affecting an individual’s life, ranging from learning strategies to self-perception of oneself and everything in between. Previous research has explored the stressors specific to students in first year engineering and how this affects students’ wellbeing overall [1] - although not specific to the motivational belief that is self-efficacy and the effect it has on their entire life. Using an inductive thematic analysis [2] on responses written by students who completed a series of self-reflections after participating in Mental Wellness and Engineering Attributes seminars offered in their first year Engineering courses, this research explores the factors that influence the connection between self-efficacy and an individual’s personal growth as described through life habits. The five themes that were found were social/spiritual wellness in terms of a support system, a fixed academic mindset with an “all or nothing” behavior, the inability to cope with transitioning and adapting out of their previous institutions, harmful expectations, and the importance of finding a balance in their everyday lives. Given these findings, the connection between self-efficacy and life habits is prevalent both negatively and positively for first year engineering students. The results suggest that individuals in their first year of engineering are caught off guard by the difficulty of the program, leading to a loss of self-efficacy and the development of new negative learning strategies - until they discover how to succeed in engineering.

Student stress and anxiety in engineering continues to be overwhelming, and students are asking for more support for their mental wellness. At the University of Calgary, we developed and implemented a program to provide first-year students with regular modules and reflection on their mental wellness and personal learning. This work is important to foster resiliency in engineeringstudents. At CEEA 2020, we summarized the pilot year of\ the program [17], and we now have an update on the program implementation as well as preliminary research results. We provide an overview of the importance of this kind of programming, specifically in breaking down theemotional-rational dualism that exists within engineering to support the de-stigmatization of mental health topics. We then provide an overview of the modules presented in this academic year, as well as a high level of summary of the research results from last year’s data.

To address an identified need for programming that helps Engineering students to develop skills in coping, resilience, and lifelong learning, we designed, implemented, and reflected on the effectiveness of a curricular intervention on Engineering students’ mental wellbeing, academic engagement and achievement, and perceptions of support. This intervention has implications for the development of a model of the curricular components necessary to benefit undergraduate students’ academic engagement, success, and perceptions of student support. It may also be used to inform curriculum development across many university programs.

In this paper, we provide an overview of an integrated mathematics curriculum that is a key element of an engineering articulation program (polytechnic to university). This integrated approach to teaching mathematics is a logical extension of the integrated curriculum models that have been gaining popularity for undergraduate engineering education since the 1960’s, and is well suited to the fast-paced nature of an engineering articulation program. We provide background on the engineering articulation program and the integrated mathematics curriculum, and provide reflections on the implementation of this approach.

Summary The phase behavior of heavy-oil/propane mixtures was mapped from temperatures ranging from 20 to 180°C and pressures up to 10 MPa. Both vapor/liquid (VL1) and liquid/liquid (L1L2) regions were observed. Saturation pressures (VL1 boundary) were measured in a Jefri 100-cm3 pressure/volume/temperature (PVT) -cell and blind-cell apparatus. The propane content at which a light propane-rich phase and a heavy bitumen-rich (or pitch) phase formed (L1/L1L2 boundary) was visually determined with a high-pressure microscope (HPM) while titrating propane into the bitumen. High-pressure and high-temperature yield data were measured using a blind-cell apparatus. Here, yield is defined as the mass of the indicated component(s) in the pitch phase divided by the mass of bitumen in the feed. A procedure was developed and used to measure propane-rich-phase and pitch-phase compositions in a PVT cell. Pressure/temperature and pressure/composition phase diagrams were constructed from the saturation-pressure and pitch-phase-onset data. High-pressure micrographs demonstrated that, at lower temperatures and propane contents, the pitch phase appeared as glassy particles, whereas at higher propane contents and temperatures, it appeared as a liquid phase. Ternary diagrams were also constructed to present phase-composition data. The ability of a volume-translated Peng-Robinson cubic equation of state (CEOS) (Peng and Robinson 1976) to match the experimental measurements was explored. Two sets of binary-interaction parameters were tested: temperature-dependent binary-interaction parameters (SvdW) and composition-dependent binary-interaction parameters (CDvdW). Models derived from both types of binary-interaction parameters matched the saturation pressures and the L1L2 boundaries at one pressure but could not match the pressure dependency of the L1L2 boundary or the measured L1L2 phase compositions. The SvdW model could not match the yield data, whereas the CDvdW model matched yields at temperatures up to 90°C.