"The lab isn't life”: Black engineering graduate students reprioritize values at the intersection of two pandemics

Background Purpose/Hypothesis Design/Method Results Conclusion Black engineering graduate students represent a critical and understudied population in engineering education. Gaining an understanding of the lived experiences of Black engineering graduate students while they are simultaneously weathering two pandemics, COVID‐19 and systemic racism, is of paramount importance.Black engineering graduate students hold a unique duality, as both Black people in the United States and Black graduate students in US engineering programs that espouse white supremacist ideals. Their real‐world experiences necessitate understanding, and this paper highlights the related impact on the students themselves, their adaptations to the pandemics, and how those adaptations relate to and affect their support needs and navigation of their engineering academic environments.An interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach was combined with community‐based participatory action research and was situated in Boykin's Triple Quandary. A family check‐in was conducted with 10 Black engineering graduate students enrolled in doctoral programs across the country to delve deep into their lived experience as a cultural community.Findings include an emergent framework of Black engineering graduate student values in response to the pandemics. These values aligned with the Black Cultural Ethos, demonstrating an adoption of collectivistic cultural values in times of crises. Further, COVID‐19 and systemic racism differentially impacted Black engineering graduate students and, thus, the manifestations of their values.For institutions to be able to effectively support their Black engineering graduate students, they must gain awareness of the students' experiences, values, and needs, in general, and amid crises specifically. The findings presented here provide a critical window into this information. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Engineering Education is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Transactional Analysis Training for Improving Engineering Graduate Students' Abilities to Understand Different Personalities

Aspiring graduate students in science and technology generally lack formal training in understanding human behaviorandtraitsthatcanadverselyimpacttheir ability to perform and innovate at the highest level. Positive intelligence(PI)andTransactionalAnalysisaretwo practical methods in human psychology that millions of people have tested for self-growth. The author previously published the application of PI for enhancing engineering students (Tyagi, P., Positive Intelligence Education for Unleashing Student Potential.ASME2019InternationalMechanicalEngineering Congress and Exposition 2019, Volume 5: Engineering Education, V005T07A009). This paper focuses on training graduate students about the popular and practical transactional analysis science and assessing their competen ce inutilizingthisknowledgetodecipher their own and other people's. Transactional analysis was taught to students via Student presentation-based effective teaching (SPET) methodologydevelopedbytheauthor.Under this approach, graduate students enrolled in the MECH 500 Class were providedasetofquestionstoanswer by self-reading of the recommendedtextbook"IamOkayYouareOkay by Thomas Harris".Eachstudentindividuallyanswered the assignment questionsandthenworkedinthegroup to prepare a group presentation for the in-class discussion. Three group discussions were conducted to present different views aboutthe four types of transactions andunderlying human traits. Before transactionalanalysistraining, studentswerealso trained in Positiveintelligencepsychologytoolsforasimilar objective. Afterthediscussion, studentsweresurveyedaboutthedepth of theirunderstanding.Studentsalsoreflectedtheirviews on the utility of transactional analysis with respect to positive intelligence. Morethan 75% of students mention that they gain high competency in understanding, defining, and utilizing transactional analysis. This study presents insights for positively impacting graduatestudents' mindsets as they pursue anunpredictedcourseofresearchthatcansometimes become very challenging. © 2022 by ASME.

A Novel Project-Oriented System on Chip (SoC) Design Course for Computer and Electrical Engineers

This paper describes a novel project-oriented system on chip (SoC) design course. The course is taught in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at the University of Texas at Arlington and is offered as CSE 4356 System on Chip Design for computer engineering undergraduates, as CSE 5356 for computer engineering graduate students, and as EE 5315 for electrical engineering graduate students. It is taught as one course combining all numbers. All students are given the same lectures, course materials, assignments, and projects. Grading standards and expectations are the same for all students as well. The course in its current form was first offered in fall 2020 and was taught online due to COVID-19 restrictions. The course was offered again in fall 2021 in a traditional on-campus, in-person mode of delivery. Two seasoned educators, with more than eighty years of total teaching experience, combined to team teach the course. One also brought more than thirty years of industrial design experience to the course. SoC FPGA devices have been available for use by designers for more than 10 years and are widely used in applications that require both an embedded microcomputer and FPGA-based logic for real-time computationally-intense solutions. Such solutions require skills in C programming, HDL programming, bus topologies forming the bridge between FPGA fabric and the microprocessor space, Linux operating systems and virtualization, and kernel device driver development. The breadth of the skills that were conveyed to students necessitated a team teaching approach to leverage the diverse background of the instructors. With such a wide range of topics, one of the biggest challenges was developing a course that was approachable for a greatly varied population of students - a mix of Computer Engineering (CpE) and Electrical Engineering (EE) students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Another, perhaps less obvious, challenge was the inherently application focus of the course, which presents challenges to many graduate students whose undergraduate degree lacked a robust hands-on design experience. Selection of an appropriate project was key to making the course effective and providing a fun learning experience for students. The projects were aligned to relevant industry applications, stressing complex modern intellectual property (IP) work flows, while still being approachable to students. The design of a universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) IP module in 2020 and a serial peripheral interface (SPI) IP module in 2021 were chosen as the projects for the first two offerings of the course. The Terasic/Intel DE1-SoC development board and Intel Quartus Prime 18.1 design software were the technologies chosen for the course. The development board and basic test instruments were provided to each student in a take-home lab kit. The system on chip design course has proven to be a popular but challenging course for our undergraduate and graduate students in computer engineering and electrical engineering. The course has demonstrated that it is possible to successfully teach an advanced design-oriented course to students of varying majors, levels, educational backgrounds, and cultures. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Work in Progress: Using Photovoice to Examine the Mental Health Experiences of Engineering Graduate Students During COVID-19

Mental health service utilization and reported mental health problems (e.g., anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation) have risen nationally. Accessibility to mental health resources is a critical concern for higher education institutions. College and university campus counseling centers are unable to keep pace with students' counseling needs. Furthermore, other resources (e.g., off-campus counseling centers) have a myriad of additional barriers that prevent students from accessing them, including cost, knowledge of services, lack of time, and mental health professional shortages. This is of great concern as students' academic progress has been shown to correlate to their mental state, with undiagnosed and untreated mental health problems affecting students' satisfaction, academic performance, research productivity, and intention to persist. Furthermore, delayed access to care is known to be a factor in increased frequency of relapse and the course of the illness. In studying mental health in higher education, researchers often group together graduate and undergraduate student populations. Yet, these studies may not account for major differences among these groups' degree programs and academic fields of study, including differing academic and social demands. Studies on engineering graduate students are particularly sparse, with most work focusing on the experiences of specific demographic communities (e.g., Black, women, or international graduate students). Work done highlights disparaging results, with engineering students exhibiting higher levels of self-reported measures of mental health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, PTSD). Research is needed to explore engineering graduate students' mental health experiences, probing more deeply at students' typical behaviors and how these behaviors are informed by expectations of being an engineer. In this pilot study, we use photovoice, a photograph elicitation and interview process, to explore how eight engineering graduate students at a large public university quantify and describe their mental health experiences. Data is being collected using an initial survey, submitted images and captions, individual interviews, and a focus group. Preliminary findings report results from the initial survey, to include measures on depression, anxiety, flourishing, academic challenges, and perceived work-life balance. These findings may provide vital information on the underlying culture in engineering with respect to mental health. Data will also show how engineering graduate students situate themselves within the engineering environment (e.g., their departments, research labs, and classes), or how they “fit”. This study will provide insight into the current state of engineering graduate student mental health and the interactions between engineering graduate students' mental health experiences, their individual expectations, and the culture of mental health in engineering. This information is vital to promote the matriculation of engineering graduate students into the workforce. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Electronic Mentoring During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects on Engineering Graduate Students' Academic, Career, and Mental Health Outcomes

As the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted engineering graduate students' learning progress, electronic mentoring has become an emerging approach for faculty to support students. The present study investigated students' e-mentoring experience and academic, career, and mental health outcomes among 566 engineering graduate students from 44 institutions in 16 states. Descriptive results showed that face-to-face mentoring activities during the COVID-19 outbreak were mainly replaced by video conferencing and emailing. Our structural equation modeling (SEM) results indicated that e-mentoring inputs (i.e., e-mentoring attitude and individual development plan) and processes (i.e., e-mentoring frequency, perceived instrumental support, and perceived psychosocial support) are positively associated with mentoring satisfaction, which in turn positively predicts student academic, career, and mental health outcomes. The findings also revealed that mentoring experience, academic progress, career self-belief, and mental health of underrepresented groups-females, lower socioeconomic status (SES) students, and students with disabilities-were disproportionately negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021