Q U E E N ’S E N G I N E E R I N G :
Vision Engineering Leaders to Meet Global Challenges
Mission We combine curiosity-driven, high-impact research with creatively inspired, technically rigorous, and experientially linked engineering programs to contribute substantively to current and future challenges that face our world.
Values •
Adaptability
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Inclusion
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Collaboration with integrity
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Curiosity
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Respect for others
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Responsibility to society
• Applied
sustainability
Research: From Curiosity to Impact
The Forefront of Engineering Education
Engineering for Everyone
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
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The Challenge Queen’s Engineering has a prestigious past as one of the country’s foremost schools of engineering, which played a major role in providing education to students from across Canada. More recently, the Faculty has extended its recruitment reach across the world. It attracts high-quality students, and has a dedicated and remarkably accomplished alumni base that stands squarely behind the Faculty. The Faculty’s ability to provide a collaborative and inspiring campus environment that creates deep bonds has been an enormous asset in cultivating a strong sense of student camaraderie that endures well past graduation. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Societal, technological, and economic change all require responses from not only the engineering profession, but also engineering educators and graduates, and the need to ensure greater societal inclusion and fairness cannot be ignored. Neither can the changing nature of the labour market nor the need for increased research intensity to meet pressing global challenges. Queen’s Engineering must continually anticipate and respond to these changing external environments. What has worked for Queen’s Engineering in the past is insufficient as we look to our future. Significant and deliberate change is needed.
There are three significant challenges facing engineering programs around the world, and Queen’s Engineering will be a leader in tackling these challenges: •
The challenge to intensify research impact, to develop solutions to the grand challenges facing the world.
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The challenge to push the frontiers of education, ensuring that we have a curriculum and a set of work-integrated learning options that are recognized as being among the most innovative in North America.
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The challenge to foster a diverse and inclusive community, ensuring that promoting and furthering the creation of a diverse talent base among students, staff, and faculty underpins all our decisions.
These are significant challenges that will require focused effort to achieve. In meeting them, the historic values and strengths of Queen’s Engineering are important assets that retain relevance and significance. The Faculty needs to operationalize them in ways that respond to a new environment. As it has done on several occasions since its founding in 1893, Queen’s Engineering needs to build on its past to evolve for the future once again. This strategic plan outlines the path to doing so.
On the following pages are listed 40 Strategic Actions (SAs) that address these three challenges.
THEME ONE
Research: From Curiosity to Impact
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Research: From Curiosity to Impact Queen’s Engineering is committed to fostering an inclusive environment that supports research excellence and collaboration. We will build on our growing strengths to create an environment that brings together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, industry, government, and the wider community to produce research that has a significant impact on the world in which we live. Queen’s Engineering research funding has increased by almost 50% over the past four years. We have prioritized faculty renewal, welcoming over 30 new faculty members during this time. Our research community has grown through a 25% increase in the number of research graduate students. Faculty renewal and growth is the key to increasing our research impact. We will continue our focus on strategic hiring of the very best in a way that complements the existing strong research talent to grow our research community. The research agenda we set out means that we need to grow further, with more faculty and graduate students to support world-class research. Continued growth in research needs to be strategically aligned to our existing and emerging areas of strength. We must commit to the development of more research space and infrastructure. We need to facilitate collaboration to strengthen and grow our research clusters. We need to support our early career researchers with mentorship, networking, and funding to accelerate their research careers. We need to foster a culture in which outstanding research is valued, recognized and visible. We will create a research environment that provides the tools, training and support necessary for our students and faculty to reach their full potential to tackle tomorrow’s greatest challenges.
OBJECTIVE 1.
Increase research capacity SA 1.1
Increase the number of faculty members by 25% by the year 2026.
SA 1.2
Grow the number of graduate students by 50% by the year 2026.
SA 1.3
Compete for graduate students by committing to being in the top five universities nationally for financial support of both international and domestic doctoral students. international collaboration and mobility of scholars.
SA 1.4
Increase the number of endowed and industry-funded chairs and professorships.
SA 1.5
Develop new research infrastructure, core facilities and equipment.
SA 1.6
Grow research funding by strengthening our partnerships with private, nonprofit, and public sectors.
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
OBJECTIVE 2.
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OBJECTIVE 3.
Support research excellence
Increase research visibility in Canada and beyond
SA 2.1
Identify and provide support for research clusters that represent areas of international leadership and prestige.
SA 3.1
Enhance our global ranking through international collaborations.
SA 2.2
Ensure early-career faculty members receive intensive support including mentoring and networking opportunities to help them build momentum and accelerate research impact.
SA 3.2
Commit to being in the top 10 Canadian Engineering programs for the scientific impact of research contributions that contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
SA 2.3
Ensure graduate students have appropriate support including professional development opportunities, space and opportunities to build community.
SA 3.3
SA 2.4
Develop mechanisms to support cross-disciplinary interactions and collaborations within and outside Queen’s Engineering, including those to support international collaboration and mobility of scholars.
Leverage marketing campaigns to better communicate and showcase Queen’s Engineering research and its impact on the world to broader communities. Expand our media outreach to celebrate our status as a recognized leader in research.
SA 3.4
Develop a new marketing campaign targeting excellent graduate students across Canada, communicating broadly about any new doctoral and post-doctoral scholarships at Queen’s Engineering.
T H E M E T WO
The Forefront of Engineering Education
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The Forefront of Engineering Education Engineers have always been problem solvers, but the scope and the challenge of the problems that we are facing have grown in complexity and scale. We will ensure that our curriculum prepares students to tackle major issues from urban development and land usage, to providing healthcare to remote populations, to mitigating climate change. We will do this with a comprehensive focus on curriculum redevelopment, enhanced experiential opportunities and investment in career support and internships. Queen’s Engineering has long been recognized for its strengths in providing a robust and engaging undergraduate experience. The Faculty continues to attract top undergraduate students, and alumni find meaningful employment and leadership roles across the globe. The Faculty has a major recruitment advantage with free discipline choice, which often distinguishes Queen’s from its competitors. The recent growth in our 12–16 month paid internship program points to a new way to further distinguish Queen’s Engineering. Global reviews of engineering education identify silos among disciplines as a major challenge that constrains the development of engineering education. Queen’s Engineering has recognized experts in educational trends in their Engineering Teaching and Learning Team (ETLT) and faculty who have internally identified many directions to ensure that their curriculum is up to date and attentive to global engineering education trends. The ETLT and the faculty need to be enabled and supported to develop interdisciplinary, relevant and future-focused curriculum. Faculty, students, alumni, employers, and staff all identified the need to ensure that students have access to hands-on learning that connects to the grand challenges of today and that have been identified in the UN SDGs.
Further commitment is needed to ensure that our undergraduate and graduate curriculum is focused on training problem-solvers who can work with people from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. We need to continue to invest in career supports for our students. Engineers learn by doing, and one of the best ways to do that is through gaining work experience before graduation. Our 12–16 month paid internship program offers students the opportunity to gain valuable work experience. This program has grown by 80% over the past 4 years. This year 40% of our fourth year class is currently out on internships. Queen’s Engineering is committed to a learning environment where “Curiosity Creates.” While there will always be requirements for discipline-specific technical skills, there is a need for space for students to experiment and learn broadly, and see how their skills can be applied to different contexts.
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We will push the frontiers of education, ensuring that the Faculty has a curriculum and a set of work-integrated learning options that are recognized as being among the most innovative in North America. OBJECTIVE 4.
OBJECTIVE 5.
Commit to curiosity-driven and challenge-based education
Enhance interdisciplinary learning
SA 4.1
SA 5.1
Investigate the feasibility of an integrated engineering program for students who are interested in a more general and multi-disciplinary curriculum experience.
SA 5.2
Investigate and decide on a new interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering.
SA 5.3
Identify and design integrative course “threads” that provide students with a curated list of courses across disciplines that tackle a common theme, such as addressing an UN SDG.
SA 5.4
Commit to reviewing upper-year electives, with the objective of reducing barriers such as pre-requisites, establishing bridging courses that facilitate an overall increase in cross-listed courses that students in different disciplines can take, and offering courses jointly by faculty in different departments.
SA 5.5
Expand opportunities to have students take courses outside of Engineering as a core part of their Engineering education with a specific aim to jointly develop courses with other Faculties in areas that speak to global challenges and the UN SDGs.
Provide course scenarios that introduce students to the grand challenges that engineers can help solve and ensure they are given the space to experiment through trial and error when working on these issues.
SA 4.2
Develop more connections between undergraduate study and research.
SA 4.3
Commit to ensuring that applied courses also introduce students to real-world challenges and issues.
SA 4.4
Identify key social challenges in the local community, Ontario, Canada, and/or around the world that students and the community can work on collaboratively.
SA 4.5
Connect both undergraduate and graduate students to entrepreneurial opportunities.
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
OBJECTIVE 6.
Expand professional experience options SA 6.1
Nurture career-ready graduates through career training that equips students to succeed in an ever-changing and complex world of work. Provide undergraduate and graduate students with enhanced support for work experiences, internships and careers.
SA 6.2
Look for ways to support and expand extra-curricular and professional development opportunities, such as student design teams, conferences, or clubs, while seeking ways to recognize their work through digital badges or micro-credentials.
SA 6.3
In addition to the Queen’s Undergraduate Internship Program, develop a range of signature summer experience options with diverse opportunities for students to develop professional skills and gain meaningful work experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors.
SA 6.4
Develop a plan for engaging Queen’s exceptional community of alumni as a key constituency for work-integrated learning experiences.
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THEME THREE
Engineering for Everyone
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Engineering for Everyone Engineering teams solve complex problems, and complex problems require diverse and inclusive perspectives. Queen’s Engineering will shoulder not just the task of making the profession more diverse, but also the task of training engineers to make inclusive teams a reality. Engineering needs to become a field that can adapt to and serve the social projects embraced by current and future generations. There are many positive shifts happening already. Queen’s undergraduates enjoy exceptional support services and Queen’s Engineering undergraduate student body is typically at least 30% women. Recruitment efforts to diversify the existing and future student body are being undertaken through initiatives such as the Indigenous Futures in Engineering program, First Generation Pathways initiative, institutional and student outreach activities, and others. Nevertheless, more needs to be done, as a significant minority of students continue to feel like they are on the outside looking in. Queen’s needs to rethink what it means to be an engineer. Queen’s Engineering is working toward a more diverse and inclusive community – to make our learning and working environment better and to advance the practice of engineering. Queen’s Engineering has recruited excellent students from Canada and around the world. The Faculty needs to become more competitive and attractive for curious students, both undergraduate and graduate, from diverse backgrounds. We need our hiring practices to shift the composition of our staff and professors to ensure diversity and equity are reflected.
We will ensure that all our decisions are underpinned by the goal to foster a diverse and inclusive talent base among students, staff, and faculty.
OBJECTIVE 7.
Recruitment and diversity Attract and enable access for intellectually curious and motivated domestic and international students from all backgrounds.
SA 7.1
Modify recruitment and admissions procedures to admit students not only on their secondary school grades but also on their commitment to hard work, their strength of character and their desire to make a social impact through engineering.
SA 7.2
Increase access to engineering at Queen’s for historically under-represented communities by developing new bursaries and scholarships.
SA 7.3
Mobilize the voices of students from equity-seeking communities in outreach, communication and marketing campaigns and through the Queen’s Equity Ambassadors program.
SA 7.4
Develop academic pathway programs, prioritizing the creation of pathways at high schools and colleges in non-traditional recruitment areas, remote locations, as well as for international students who live both overseas and in Canada.
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
OBJECTIVE 8.
Support and inclusion
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OBJECTIVE 9.
Provide all students with holistic support and intentional inclusion.
Leverage diversity and inclusion among faculty, staff, and senior administrators
SA 8.1
SA 9.1
Implement regular education and training sessions for all faculty, staff, and senior administration in equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigenization.
SA 9.2
Incorporate equity, diversity and inclusion criteria into every phase of the hiring process, including job posting, the composition of hiring committees, interview questions and other measures of candidate excellence.
SA 9.3
Embed competency in equity, diversity, and inclusion as a requirement for all faculty, staff, and senior administrator positions.
Enhance the student support system for both academic and well-being that supports undergraduate and graduate students and particularly ensures that students from diverse backgrounds are set up for success.
SA 8.2
Build off the success of the Aboriginal Access to Engineering program by using it as a template to develop programming to support other equity-seeking groups.
SA 8.3
Make community inclusion more intentional by embracing and understanding different experiences, backgrounds, perspectives, and identities, and empower students of all backgrounds to develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills within and outside the classroom.
SA 8.4
Partner with the Engineering Society to create the change in environment necessary to ensure students from under-represented groups feel a strong sense of belonging to the Queen’s Engineering community.
SA 8.5
Commit to understanding and incorporating ways of knowing from nearby Indigenous nations, such as holistic framing of what makes a project necessary and what decolonizing curriculum means in an engineering context.
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Strategy Enablers To enable these strategic objectives and actions, certain measures need to be taken to provide support for students, faculty, and staff in their daily work. We will enhance Queen’s Engineering structures and processes and foster opportunities for participatory leadership, transparent decision-making, and shared accountability. The following enablers are presented as actions that ensure that our environment is inclusive and supportive and that our community is well informed, empowered and committed to making the strategic plan a success:
I.
Commit to making mental health the foundation of all that we do. Work to have resources in place to proactively support our community well-being, and to create an environment that is safe and conducive to learning and growth.
II.
Develop an internal communication plan, developed by faculty members and staff, committed to breaking the silos among the departments by creating spaces and commitments to sharing ideas across departments and units. Foster a culture of service excellence and process improvement through recognition of contributions and deliberate diffusion of best practices across the Faculty.
III.
Offer regular educational sessions in Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenization (EDII), and embed competency in EDII as a requirement for all students, faculty, staff, and senior administrator positions.
IV.
In consultation with equity-seeking groups, develop appropriate ways to collect, analyze and report on data and metrics of EDII initiatives to effectively monitor progress. Ensure that any improvements in these metrics are celebrated and the work of staff and faculty to make these shifts are recognized.
V.
Create a culture of excellence and support that recognizes and celebrates excellence through the creation of a new recognition and award program at Queen’s Engineering for both internal and external partners.
Summary This document is just the start for our new five-year plan. There are some ambitious goals, but this is a time where ambition and audacity are needed to tackle the challenges that face us. This plan is also a conversation starter and a document that will develop and grow through work and dialogue among our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other partners. Together, we will build the future of Queen’s Engineering. In creating this plan, the Faculty of Engineering commits to developing annual reporting to update our status, to assess that the goals and metrics remain relevant to our operational realities, and to ensure that our plan aligns with the wider goals of Queen’s University. The Strategic Plan should not simply be a task list—it needs to be a document used to guide and evaluate decisions. In issuing this plan, the Faculty of Engineering is committing to fostering diversity, pushing the frontiers of teaching, and honing our research excellence. The Faculty of Engineering has an excellent history and reputation, and we intend to go even further to make Queen’s Engineering the place where global challenges are addressed and solved by our researchers, our students and our graduates.