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Saint Mary’s Engineering to expand and foster excellence within the next generation of professionals
Engineering education should prioritize hands-on learning and opportunities for trial and error.
This concept is what drives Saint Mary’s University’s (SMU) recently announced engineering facilities and faculty expansion to the former Language Centre building at 960 Tower Road this September.
This move is about accommodating more students and providing them with the best possible learning environment, fostering creativity and technical growth through experimentation in state-of-the-art laboratories.
The expansion, which aims to increase the engineering program from 240 to 320 students over the next two academic years, is a testament to SMU’s commitment to a brighter future for up-and-coming engineering professionals.
According to Dr. Samuel Veres, P.Eng., Dean of the Faculty of Science, this expansion has been anticipated for a long time.
“When I started at the university in 2013, engineering was already trying to acquire additional space on campus to provide students more interactive activities that are so important for engineering education,” says Dr. Veres. “When the space became available on Tower Road, it was finally identified as a space for us to provision the program better.”
Faculty offices, research spaces, engineering classrooms, laboratories, and design workshops will be relocated and reimagined in the three-floor building.
After an initial architectural study to confirm the space size would suit their purposes, the Director of Engineering, Donald MacNeil, P.Eng., was primarily responsible for the functional layout.
“He was able to sit with the new floorplans and compare them to the current space and set out a plan for each,” says Dr. Veres.
MacNeil determined the first floor will house open-concept workspaces to facilitate group work in design projects. The second floor will hold expansive classrooms and labs, including mechanics of materials, electric circuits, and thermofluids. And finally, an engineering design classroom and faculty research labs will be on the third floor.
The building is roomy and bright—a facility that evokes modern innovation.
“In our previous space, we’ve had to reconfigure it to suit various activities at different times of the year,” says Dr. Veres. “When we’ve had a thermodynamics lab, for example, we’ve had to remove apparatuses from storage and set them up and then remove them for the next afternoon’s mechanics of materials lab.”
“In the new building, the idea is that we’ll have all of these activities in semi-permanent, individual configurations to allow students to undertake more hands-on work and more students than previously possible.”
Quite often, in an undergraduate engineering laboratory setting, classes are split into two groups—one working on a paper-based problem that is more tutorial in nature and the other on a physical experimentation activity. The new layout’s larger classrooms will allow class groups to work directly beside one another, naturally switching activities halfway through, rather than moving rooms as they had to in the previous space.
SMU Faculty now have the opportunity to develop a broader range of lab assignments, thus creating a sense of continuity between applied theory and real-world engineering problems.
“It’s through these interactions that you learn how the world works. Engineering students need to be assembling, creating, designing and testing,” Dr. Veres says. “Being able to relate that physical design work and laboratory testing to the theoretical work they’re getting in lectures is a feedback mechanism where one helps support the other.”
When a student can construct something and find out it doesn’t work in testing, determining what needs to be changed or adjusted elicits problem-solving skills — a central quality of engineering excellence.
SMU Engineering acknowledges and appreciates each student’s problem-solving learning preferences.
“Some students can very quickly see how to take the theory and apply that to their physical tasks, and for some students, it’s the opposite — they gain a lot from that physical experimentation and that then makes them able to absorb and appreciation that theoretical knowledge that they’re getting better.”
Beyond the immediate improvements to the university’s offerings, this locative move is part of a far more expansive mission. As a passionate researcher and trailblazing mechanical engineer, Dr. Veres hopes to see more SMU engineering graduates engaged with the community in Nova Scotia, both on and off campus.
Working in duality to serve Dr. Veres and other faculty’s vision, SMU Engineering is in the middle stages of developing a 16-month master’s in engineering management program at the university, which the new facility would support.
“We hope the master’s program will be a good way for those engineering students who have graduated and had a couple of years in the workforce to transition into managerial roles that a lot of engineers begin without any formal training or education,” says Dr. Veres.
“We’re excited about the prospect of appealing to graduates who have maybe gone to other provinces to work and are looking for a pathway to move back home and continue in the engineering field.”
SMU’s prospective master’s in engineering management program would be unique in its collaborative effort in the North American landscape.
While a typical engineering management degree consists of business courses slightly restructured to suit people with an engineering background, SMU’s division of engineering, industrial organizational psychology group and management science group in the Sobey School of Business are working to create one-ofa-kind programming. These critical and disciplined managerial courses will draw on real-world interactions in the engineering sphere.
Once the curriculum is finalized, the university will submit it to the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission for approval. The goal is to initiate the first student intake in September 2025.
“The industrial organizational psychology piece will set this program apart from others,” says Dr. Veres. “Engineers usually don’t receive any training on managerial skills, so we’re looking forward to offering a more formalized pathway to success.”
SMU’s coupled efforts will undoubtedly encourage professional practice, intellectual ability, and clever inventions within the engineering profession in the province and beyond.
With these developments on the near horizon, Dr. Veres is energized to be involved in teaching and uplifting the next generation of engineers.
