Engineering affects the thriving of society at large, yet the education of engineering students is not known for thriving (yet). Thus, merging positive psychology and engineering is crucial for engineers to improve large-scale personal and societal functioning. However, existing measures from positive psychology did not fully apply to undergraduate engineering students. Thus, I developed a model and measure specifically for this population and called this research “engineering thriving.” This talk follows an exploratory multiphase research design, with four studies, that highlight past and present research in engineering thriving, as well as future opportunities to collaborate.

The first two studies include published work. The first study reports a scoping literature review of 68 papers to define engineering thriving as the process in which engineering students develop and refine competencies that allow them to function optimally in engineering programs. From this definition, the second study employed a Delphi process with 47 experts to develop a model of engineering thriving.

The next two studies include ongoing work. The third study tests some of these relationships proposed in the model of engineering thriving using structural equation model (SEM) on a large dataset of over 2,000 undergraduate engineering students (from the U.S., Canada, and Germany) who have completed a survey that measures various constructs associated with thriving. Findings from SEM suggest that gratitude was one of the most important competencies for engineering student thriving, and that a holistic model approach accounted for 79% of the variance in engineering students’ belongingness and 25% of the variance in perceptions of faculty caring. The fourth study highlights findings from two interventions to teach positive psychology in undergraduate engineering classrooms. Findings suggest that engineering students respond better to positive psychology interventions that are micro-dosed as part of existing engineering curricula than as an independent course.

This talk concludes with future opportunities for merging positive psychology and engineering that may be of interest to researchers and practitioners.