Gelles, L. A., & Knight, L., & Maczka, D. K. (2025, July), GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students  Paper presented at FYEE 2025 Conference, University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--55270

\bibitem{asee_peer_55270}
  Gelles, L. A., \& Knight, L., \& Maczka, D. K. (2025, July), \emph{GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students}
  Paper presented at FYEE 2025 Conference, University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland.
  10.18260/1-2--55270

Laura Ann Gelles, Laura Knight, and Darren K Maczka.  "GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students".  FYEE 2025 Conference, University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland, 2025, July.  ASEE Conferences, 2025.  https://peer.asee.org/55270 Internet.  10 Aug, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_55270}
  Laura Ann Gelles, Laura Knight, and Darren K Maczka.
  "GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students".
  \emph{FYEE 2025 Conference, University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland, 2025, July}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2025.
  https://peer.asee.org/55270 Internet.  10 Aug, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_55270
author = "Laura Ann Gelles, Laura Knight, and Darren K Maczka"
title = "GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students"
booktitle = "FYEE 2025 Conference"
year = "2025"
month = "July"
address = "University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/55270}
number = {10.18260/1-2--55270}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Upon entering their first year of engineering, students quickly discover that they will experience heavy workloads, difficult classes, and stress. These students need to quickly adapt and learn professional skills such as time management to ensure their success in a rigorous discipline like engineering. Many programs and auxiliary services geared towards first-year students offer ways to learn these time management and other critical skills. However, many students do not pursue these services for a variety of reasons including lack of awareness, lack of time, and/or perceived importance. The Engineering Fundamentals program deliberately integrates time management and other professional skills into one of their first-year courses for students who are not calculus-ready.  While this provides some practice with time management skills, many students perceive typical time management activities (e.g., building a schedule) as busy work and struggle to see the relevance. In order to counter this, the time management lesson was retooled to focus on time management as a tool in a larger toolkit to deal with stress, which is more immediately salient to them. This GIFTS paper describes the initial implementation of a ‘stress toolkit’ for first-year students in its first offering (i.e., flipped classroom learning pages to be read before class) and its subsequent semester where the stress toolkit was integrated at multiple points in the semester both in and outside of class. For students who continued to struggle (i.e., poor exam performance), students were incentivized to learn even more advanced time and stress management techniques combined with developing a growth mindset. Feedback from these cohorts of students has been positive about the stress toolkit including those who mention using it without being solicited and those who utilize it for other classes. Further integration and expansion of this toolkit is planned for the current course and for the next course in their first-year sequence.

AU  - Laura Ann Gelles
AU  - Laura Knight
AU  - Darren K Maczka
CY  - University of Maryland - College Park, Maryland
DA  - 2025/07/27
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - GIFTS: Time Management as a Tool in a Stress Toolkit for First-Year Engineering Students
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/55270
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--55270
ER  -