Over its many years of practice, the engineering academic environment has developed a reputation that counters the mental well-being of its students through a normalized culture of stress that glorifies students’ extreme resilience to intense demands at the expense of self-care. As a result, engineering students often fail to engage in self-care activities and seek mental health professional help when needed, inhibiting the development of noncognitive skills that would otherwise reduce students’ stress and improve program retention. While most universities do not explicitly integrate teachings of emotional intelligence, stress management, and self-care practices into their curricula, some groups have begun to implement different degrees of wellness initiatives within their programs to improve students’ abilities to cope within the academic environment. However, a clear method to aid engineering students in successfully developing these essential skills has not yet been defined in literature. Therefore, this study evaluates the effectiveness of a quarter-long wellness course for engineering students at the INSTITUTION by investigating the impact of the course on students’ emotional intelligence and psychological capital. A 10-week engineering course was designed with weekly lectures (50 minutes each) focused primarily on developing emotional intelligence skills of engineering students. Self-care activities were also discussed in the course. The course emphasized the importance of emotional intelligence and self-care on engineering leadership and engineering practice. The course was available to all engineering majors at the INSTITUTION and it currently does not count towards students’ degree requirements, nor does it affect student’s GPA. Additionally, the course is taught as an overload to the instructor’s teaching schedule, and there was an average of 12-15 students enrolled per academic quarter. It was hypothesized that the wellness course would increase students’ emotional intelligence and psychological capital. The hypothesis was evaluated with three different groups: (i) students who participated in the 10-week wellness course, (ii) students who completed a short wellness assignment in a core chemical engineering class, and (iii) a control group, i.e. students who did not participate in the wellness course nor did not complete the short wellness assignment. Students from all groups completed surveys evaluating trait emotional intelligence (wellbeing, self-control, emotionally, sociability, and global trait) and psychological capital (self-efficacy, hope, resilience, optimism) at the beginning and at the end of the quarter. Students received a $10 gift card as an incentive for completing both surveys. Additionally, to determine correlations between personality and demographics (ethnicity, gender, first-generation) in the results, students also completed the Big Five personality test and provided demographic information when completing each survey. Descriptive statistics and paired t-tests with a significance level of 0.05 were calculated to analyze pre- and post- treatment results using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows ver. 30. The internal consistency of each questionnaire was evaluated with Cronbach’s alpha. This study was determined exempt by the Institutional Review Board (IRB ID 2215359-1). This project is at initial stages, and the data collected in Fall 2024, Winter 2025, and Spring 2025 will be presented. While initial results from the data collected in Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 do not indicate statistically significant improvements in emotional intelligence and psychological capital in all groups studied, additional surveying is planned after an additional quarter following the wellness course to allow more time for students to practice learned skills. This data is currently being collected and will also be presented. It is expected that the outcomes of this study will provide information for other institutions to implement a similar course to develop emotional intelligence and psychological capital of engineering students.
