Redesigning Engineering 101: Promoting Student Wellness in Introductory Courses

Over the past decade, and especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing focus on the mental health and well-being of undergraduate students. In fact, recent studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an even more rapid decline to students' mental health and increased levels of stress and anxiety. To combat this, many universities are renewing their focus on student health and well-being and exploring ways to support their students. In this work-in-progress paper, we present a collaboration between the university's wellness faculty/staff and the Department of Engineering to promote student mental health, provide students with tools and resources for developing their time- and self-management skills, and create a framework for other disciplines/programs to do the same. To this end, we revised the EGR 101: Introduction to Engineering course to include a "weekly wellness" activity. Each activity consisted of a 15-minute class discussion followed by a commitment from students to practice the activity several times throughout the week (5-10 minutes, 3-4 times throughout the week) and provide a 1-paragraph reflection. Example topics included "Goal Visualization", "Time Management", "Make Stress Your Friend", and "Use Your Strengths". Each was adapted from "A Guide to Incorporating Social-Emotional Learning in the College Classroom: Busting Anxiety, Boosting Ability" by Gallagher, K. & Stocker, S. Through the collaboration, we emphasized and related each topic to the experiences that many first-year, first-semester students were having at the time, and how the tools/topics covered apply to their academic lives, personal lives, and future engineering careers. To evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot program, we conducted a survey of the students that assessed which wellness activities they found useful, how they used the activities in their daily lives, and how the activities helped with the transition from high school to undergraduate studies. We plan to use the results of this survey to continue to improve and refine the wellness component of EGR 101, and provide recommendations to other, similar courses across different disciplines so that they can emphasize the importance of student wellness and promote it for their students.