Do you aspire to apply the knowledge you gain in class to real-world projects? Joining an engineering project team could be the perfect opportunity to enhance your technical skills 🛠! Let’s hear from Darrion about his experiences in the NUS Formula SAE team!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hi I'm Darrion and I'm not so tall :> I'm currently in Year 3 and am part of the NUS FSAE program 🏎! I'm also part of the NUS Skating Club 🛼! I love to treasure all the MADness in life (gettit M x A x D = moments hehe xD) ❓ What inspired you to join NUS FSAE? ✏️ I've always been a fan of F1, and NUS FSAE happens to be the closest thing I could get to having a taste of what a career in racing would be like! Besides that, I was also fascinated by the hands-on approach NUS FSAE has to offer, which greatly enhances my learning experience at NUS. ❓ What is your main role in the team? ✏️ My main role is to design the rear suspension of the car. It is basically everything in between the wheels and the chassis, not just the 2 springs!! It includes the entire process of designing, optimising, manufacturing, and assembling all the wishbones and clevises. ❓ Share about your experiences in NUS FSAE! What was the toughest difficulty you faced and how did you overcome it? ✏️ I would say that the toughest part of NUS FSAE is time management. We have to produce a new car every year as per competition rules; hence, there are strict deadlines we ought to meet. I learned that it was crucial to stay motivated and to minimise procrastination such that both my academic and NUS FSAE workload do not snowball :d ❓ Why should people join NUS FSAE? ✏️ BECAUSE RACE CARS GO VROOM VROOM 🏎💨 ✏️ It is a platform to put everything we learned in our modules to good use. It is extremely rewarding to watch everything you worked hard on come together in a fascinating final product which you can be proud of :> ❓ Currently, what is the most exciting event that you are most looking forward to, and why? ✏️ For sure, this would be the R23e shakedown. This is the first time where the car we've spent the past year building will be put on track (or... a school carpark). Despite it being an EV, it still got the loud vroom vrooms from the sound of the chains!
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Do you aspire to apply the knowledge you gain in class to real-world projects? Joining an engineering project team could be the perfect opportunity to enhance your technical skills! Let’s hear from Chen Ang about his experiences in the NUS Robomaster team!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hello, I am Chen Ang, a Year 3 Mechanical Engineering student. Besides Robomaster, I am also in the NUS Basketball Club and E-Sports Club. I’d encourage everyone to try out for whatever clubs they want during their time at NUS! ❓ What inspired you to join Robomaster? ✏️ I joined the Mechanical Engineering Program in NUS with the intention of specialising in Robotics, but I actually had zero experience or knowledge of robots. NUS Robomaster promoted themselves during my orientation camp, and it looked fun, and an opportunity for me to learn more about robots, so I tried it out. ❓ What is your main role in the team? ✏️ I started out as just helping out with the 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) modeling for the robot. This included parts and assemblies in the robot that were eventually going to be fabricated. After a while, I became the project manager for one of the robots, and together with my teammate, we discussed and came up with our own idea for the robot, modeled it and eventually assembled it to the best of our abilities. Now, I’m busier with studies, so I mainly help out where I can and give advice based on the experiences I’ve had. ❓ Share about your experiences in Robomaster! What was your most memorable moment while working on the project? ✏️ The most memorable moment I’ve had is when we organised an internal competition in the club. With the Robomaster competition being postponed due to COVID, it was our first chance to actually battle with the robots that we built. The work to get the competition organised was hard, but the experience was great! ❓ What would you like to say to people considering joining Robomaster? ✏️ I would say that if you are interested in robotics or mechanical design, you should definitely consider joining! Even if it’s not Robomaster, I’d say that the other teams in CDE like Bumblebee and the FSAE team are good too, it’s a great way to apply what you have learnt in classes. Personally, I’ve benefited from being able to talk about my projects and experiences in Robomaster during internship interviews. ❓ Currently, what is the most exciting event that you are most looking forward to, and why? ✏️ Currently, the team is building robots to participate in the Robomaster competition overseas, and it’s the first time many of us have had this opportunity, so we are all looking forward to it! Do you aspire to apply the knowledge you gain in class to real-world projects? Joining an engineering project team could be the perfect opportunity to enhance your technical skills! Let’s hear from Kaustav about his experiences in the AeroNUS ✈️ team!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hi, I'm Kaustav Mukherjee, a year 3 mechanical engineering student. I'm also taking the iDP as my second major, and am currently a part of NOC Silicon Valley batch 43. Fun Fact: My favourite food is mala xiang guo :) ❓ What inspired you to join AeroNUS? ✏️ I've been interested in aeronautics for a long time and entered NUS with the aeronautics specialization. When I saw that there was an Aero team that was recruiting, I decided to join, as I didn't have any large plans for my year 2 and felt like it would be a good experience. ❓ What was your main role in the team? ✏️ Initially, I began by working on the wings for our very first training plane. I was good at Solidworks already and I wanted to explore more about aerodynamics, so I felt like that would be a good way to learn more. Eventually, I stepped up to work on the tail, do the parametric sizing and optimization for the competition plane, and even design the fuselage, so I ended up kind of becoming the chief engineer. It was a lot of work trying to lead the time while having to learn everything myself (I was still year 2 at the time), but it gave me the opportunity to really experience designing and manufacturing an entire system in a team setting. ❓ Share about your experiences in AeroNUS! What was your most memorable moment while working on the project? ✏️ The main thing I seem to remember is the monumental effort put in by the entire team throughout the year. The payload team made 7 prototypes for their system in 2 months, moving from foam to wood to carbon fiber infused PLA for the final system. The landing gear kept having to be tuned and fixed after every flight test because we couldn't get it right initially, and the landing gear team pulled through all the way to the end. I think the highlight would have to be our US trip, where we fixed the entire plane overnight after a crash. We always wanted to design it to be easier to repair, especially after our first prototype was a pain to build in the first place, and it felt gratifying to have achieved that goal by the end. ❓ How did you feel when the team won the 14th place in the AAIA Design, Build, Fly (DBF) Competition last year? Was it a tough journey for the team? ✏️ We actually won 14th place only for the report score. The scoring is done in 2 parts: the report, and the flight. When we found out we got 14th for the report, we were extremely surprised as we basically did everything from scratch and managed to beat out 95 other teams, many of whom had more consistent and larger teams over the past year. The best part was the look of shock on our supervisor's face - I think he was impressed as well :) ✏️ Unfortunately, our plane crashed out of bounds during one of our flights in the competition, and that disqualified us from flying again for that year. The winds were unbelievably bad, especially compared to Singapore where there is practically no wind, and our testing and designing were insufficient to counter those winds. Our plane was impossible to control in those conditions. ✏️ It felt quite horrible knowing that we weren't able to get a flight score after what is probably over 10,000 hours of work from the team over the course of the year. However, we didn't feel like one crash marked the end of the journey for what is still a fledgling team compared to our competitors and some of the other, more established teams in NUS. We spent the next 6 months after the competition hosting a bootcamp and training and mentoring the new team, who I would like to say are absolutely excellent, and were able to achieve a tied 1st place result for their proposal! I hope that the legacy we set through our efforts and our mentorship will continue throughout the future teams and we can achieve better and better results. ❓ What would you like to say to students considering joining AeroNUS? ✏️ If you're interested in aeronautics, AeroNUS is the best opportunity for you to learn and experience what it's like to build flying systems. This experience is extremely valuable - we've got alumni interning at Airbus, DSO, DSTA, ST Engineering, Pratt and Whitney, and more. I got into NOC mostly by talking about my experience in AeroNUS as well! ✏️ Now that I'm somehow nearly done with university, I realize more and more that these short 4 years are fleeting. You'll meet a lot of people and leave them behind a year later, and you'll sit in lectures and tutorials and forget about it all. University can be extremely mundane, and you have to find ways to make it exciting. For me, the year I spent in AeroNUS was one of the most memorable of my life, and I made friends that I still talk to regularly. It's not the classes nor the certificates, but experiences like AeroNUS that make university worth it, and can enrich your university journey as much as it did mine. Don't have the opportunity to participate in SEP but still want to gain an overseas experience? Hear from Michael (in the middle) about his summer programme experience in Germany!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hi everyone, I'm Michael and I'm a Year 4 Mechanical Engineering student with Second Major in Innovation and Design. I like teaching, 3D Printing as well as Xiangsheng (traditional Chinese standup comedy). I co-founded the first Xiangsheng performing club in Singapore, and I do have a lot of commitment there. So I think I might be considered as a ‘busy person’. ❓ Why did you choose to go on a summer programme? ✏️ I chose Summer Programme instead of SEP mainly because I wish to experience overseas university life but I can’t reserve a full semester for SEP due to my personal schedule. I decided to join the TU Darmstadt Summer Programme because it offers both Engineering and German Language Courses, and it is the first time international on-site sessions being available ever since Covid outbreak. ❓ Share about your experiences during the summer programme! ✏️ The Mechatronics Engineering class was very interesting and useful. I actually utilised some of the knowledge I gained in TUDa even after I came back to NUS. As for the Intensive German Course, as the name suggests, the workload will be intense, but you will be surprised by how much progress you can make. The instructors are very friendly and helpful, and you can make huge improvements under the learning environment of TUDa. ✏️ Besides academic content, during our time in Germany, we also had a chance to travel to various cities. We have visited classical attraction sites, such as the old city of Heidelberg and Munich, as well as engineering and technology-focused places, such as the European Space Agency and the Mercedes Factory. travelling around Germany allowed me to expose to the unique culture and innovative environment. It was indeed a memorable experience. ❓ Share about an interesting event that happened during your time there! ✏️ In Germany, the term Mineralwasser is not directly equivalent to our mineral water. Instead, it is referring to a kind of carbonated sparkling water. It comes with a slight sweet taste with dissolved carbon dioxide. You may need some time to adapt to this taste if you are not a huge fan of carbonated drinks. Most bottled water in the supermarket falls into this kind (labeled as ‘mit Kohlensäure’) and only a small portion of them are non-carbonated (labeled as ‘ohne Kohlensäure still’). I was not aware of this fact, and have to drink carbonated sparkling water for almost a week. And talking about drinks, in German restaurants, some beers can actually be cheaper than water. So besides letting you experience the German beer culture, drinking beer might even be a method for you to ‘save money’. ❓ Any advice or additional information you would like to add? ✏️ Summer programme is a unique kind of experience. It does not span into the usual school semester, so it will not affect your usual academic module plan at all. Although the programme schedule might be slightly tighter than SEP, there are a lot of chances for you to get exposed to the local culture. I do recommend joining this session if you are a busy person just like me, who really can’t squeeze out time for SEP but still wish to get an overseas experience. Kommen Sie bitte nach Darmstadt, denn wir sind Ingenieure! Still contemplating 🤔 whether you should participate in an exchange 🏙 programme? Hear from Jia Cheng about his SEP experience!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hi I am Lee Jia Cheng, currently in Y3S2 mechanical engineering! I did my SEP in University of Waterloo (UW), Canada. I love strategy games like chess, bridge and mahjong!! ❓ Why did you choose to go on SEP? ✏️ I feel that SEP is a great opportunity to be able to meet and connect with others from different background and cultures. Doing an engineering exchange in an overseas university also exposes me to the different learning and assessment styles used by the partner university. ✏️ It is also a great time to practise and enhance certain aspects of independent living such as cooking, doing the laundry etc. And not to forget, escape from the heat and travel to see many other beautiful sights and places! ❓ Share about your experiences during SEP! ✏️ One thing that I noticed quickly was the difference in teaching and assessment styles in UW vs NUS. At least for the engineering modules, UW placed higher focus on projects and collaborative lab reports. Ironically, it also happened to be my first in-person semester since starting university and I managed to make friends with a few locals and other exchange students! Overall it was an interesting and enriching experience at UW! ✏️ I did make a few trips whenever I could such as to Montreal, Scarborough and downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, the workload throughout the semester increased and I no longer had the time to travel. ❓ Share about an interesting event that happened during your time there! ✏️ Not an event that happened in school but I did go for Halloween Horror Nights as well as attempted some of the tallest rollercoasters in the world at Canada’s Wonderland! ❓ Any advice or additional information you would like to add? ✏️ Start your research early! SEP planning begins as early as year 2! Do try as much as possible to go out of your comfort zones, make new friends and connections and do the things that you always wanted to do or things that aren’t available in Singapore! And lastly have fun! Still contemplating 🤔 whether you should participate in an exchange 🏙 programme? Hear from Dallas (on the right) about his SEP experience in Canada 🇨🇦!
❓ Please give a short introduction and share a fun fact about yourself! ✏️ Hi everyone I’m Dallas from Y3 ME and I went to the University of Waterloo for my exchange during Fall 2022. Fun fact about me is that I like spoilers. ❓ Why did you choose to go on SEP? ✏️ I want to experience living abroad and what it is like to study overseas. Also, it is one of the highlights of University where you get to be fully independent. Thus when given this opportunity, I jumped at the chance to go for exchange, and I’m still super grateful for that. ❓ Share about your experiences during SEP! ✏️ I was taken aback by how inclusive and friendly everyone is. The have gender neutral toilets and the University staffs sign off their emails with their preferred pronouns. That was something I don’t experience in Singapore. People there are also very friendly and helpful. I remember watching World Cup in one of the computer rooms and celebrating with the local students when our favourite teams scored. ✏️ Some of the lectures there are conducted very differently from NUS. For instance, there is a module where we had to copy every single content by hand while the prof explained. It was difficult to catch up with what was going on and it made me appreciate NUS’s lecture style a lot more. Then there is another module where the weightage of midterm and final exams is variable - the one which you did better will have a higher weightage. ✏️ Apart from that there isn’t too much difference. Engineering is a miraculous thing where you can fail every exam and yet somehow pass the overall course. Jokes aside lol, because we just need to get a passing grade, it wasn’t very stressful. ❓ Share about an interesting event that happened during your time there! ✏️ My friend and I saw a couple of local students looking very intently at the map of a small island on google maps. It was a familiar looking diamond-shaped island, and it didn’t take long for us to figure out that they were in fact, looking at Singapore. We approached them and it turned out that they are interested in coming here for exchange. Needless to say, we began sharing more about the different Universities and the culture here. It was fascinating to see that people actually know about Singapore, and it makes me feel proud that Singapore has such a relevant presence in the global stage. ❓ Any advice or additional information you would like to add? ✏️ Start planning for exchange early - module mapping, choice of universities etc. Go with an open mind and try not to surround yourself too much with Singaporean friends. Get to know other exchange students as well so that you can have free tour guides around the world when you travel in the future. ✏️ Hi I am Dr Seah Kar Heng! I obtained my B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton, U.K., and subsequently, my Master's and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Queen’s University, Canada, under a Commonwealth scholarship, with a bond to teach in NUS.
I am a retired ME professor who loves music. I played various instruments in the Braddell Heights Symphony Orchestra, and sometimes conducted the orchestra. ❓ What was the most memorable experience you had in NUS? ✏️ Some of my students tell me that I taught their parents before in the same LT7. I even taught two of my children in LT7. I have ex-students who are now my colleagues teaching in various departments in CDE. My early batches of students have retired and many of them still visit me on campus for nostalgia. ❓ Share one interesting thing that you have been working on recently! ✏️ After two decades of turning down USP’s invitation, I have finally gone to teach there (now NUS College) where most of my students are from Humanities and Arts. Instead of marking students’ answers to three decimal places, I now have to read long essays of several thousand words. No complaints, though. I enjoy teaching, no matter what subject. My Chinese name says it all 佘教兴 ❓ What is one piece of advice you would like to offer to ME students? ✏️ Make full use of the chance to develop yourself as a person while studying in NUS. You will not get such an opportunity ever again. ✏️ I am Dr Jason Ku, a Senior Lecturer here at NUS, and I enjoy teaching students! Before coming to NUS, I was at MIT for 15 years (2005-2020), first as an undergraduate, masters, and PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, then as a postdoc and lecturer in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A fun fact about me is that I am an origami designer, which informs my research designing structures that fold and transform. I currently serve as Chairman of the Board for OrigamiUSA, an origami organization in America. Here is my website (unfortunately still hosted by MIT web servers): https://jasonku.mit.edu/
❓ What was the most memorable experience you had while in university? ✏️ Of course academics was the major focus of my time as an MIT student. But my most memorable experiences were with the numerous student groups I was involved with: multiple singing groups (MIT Logarythms, MIT Chamber Music Society, MIT Chamber/Concert Choirs), a residential living group (Theta Chi Fraternity), and the MIT origami club (OrigaMIT). Participating in these groups helped me grow as a person, from a very shy first-year student into a group leader and someone comfortable performing on stage in concerts nearly once a week. Those experiences taught me valuable lessons in public speaking, diplomatic communication, and how to work effectively with others. ❓ Share one interesting thing that you have been working on recently! ✏️ This summer, as part of my research, I developed a piece of software called "flat-folder" that can exhaustively compute all possible valid folded states of a flat-foldable origami crease pattern, using a new algorithm that, for many inputs, is provably faster than previous algorithms. One might think that just knowing the location and direction of folds on a paper (e.g., a crease pattern) would be enough to determine how to fold an origami model; but actually, even deciding whether a given crease pattern can fold flat without intersection is NP-hard [1] (read as "widely accepted to be intractable to solve using modern computers"). But more importantly, "flat-folder" produces pretty images of foldings for real origami models, which I post daily to an instagram account. Here are links to the project's github repository and instagram account: https://github.com/origamimagiro/flat-folder https://www.instagram.com/flat_folder/ [1] Akitaya, H.A., Cheung, K.C., Demaine, E.D, Ku, J.S., Horiyama, T., Hull, T., Tachi, T., Uehara, R. (2016). Box Pleating is Hard. In: Akiyama, J., Ito, H., Sakai, T., Uno, Y. (eds) Discrete and Computational Geometry and Graphs. JCDCGG 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9943. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48532-4_15 ❓ What is one piece of advice you would like to offer to ME students? ✏️ A degree in Mechanical Engineering is globally recognized because it provides an excellent perspective of the world, together with a standard set of tools that can be used to approach and answer many problems. But every discipline has its own perspective and tools, and it can be useful to gain many perspectives. These days, Computer Science is very popular because almost every discipline (in both industry and academia) is using computers to advance their fields. ✏️ At NUS, computing skills are primarily taught by the School of Computing, so incoming students think they need to major in Computer Science to learn those skills. But computing as a field is different from computing as a skill. As an analogy, ME students take classes in mathematics, but that doesn't mean they should all become mathematicians. The reality is that most students want to learn computing skills to apply them to applications in other fields; for ME students, those fields might be Robotics or Machine Learning. ✏️ So my advice to ME students would be to supplement your ME degree requirements with a single additional module: specifically CS2040C, an algorithms course that teaches you how to reason about computer programs and to argue that they are correct and efficient. (CS2040C is a version of CS2040 targeted to students outside of SoC.) It provides a different and valuable perspective that will make you a more effective Mechanical Engineer, with the added benefit of preparing you for programming interviews in case that is relevant to you. Full disclosure, I am biased, since for 3 years before coming to NUS, I taught 6.006, the MIT equivalent of CS2040. You can find recordings of the last term I taught 6.006 on OCW: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/ ✏️ Hi! I am Asst Prof Tan Yu Jun. I am new to the department, and I have just started to give lectures this semester. I like gardening and interacting with my pet when I am at home.
❓ What was the most memorable experience you had while in university? ✏️ When I was in the university, I always hang out with my friends. We formed study groups, celebrated birthdays, went out for late-night suppers, and made lots and lots of fond memories. I remember times when close to the finals, we woke up early in the morning to “chope” our favourite tutorial room so that we can study in our “territory”. Woah I cannot imagine all these happened about 10 years ago! ❓ Share one interesting thing that you have been working on recently! ✏️ I am researching how to teach undergraduate and graduate students lately. I had 3 months of experience teaching primary school students, but teaching adults are so much different and interesting. I am learning how to deliver information effectively, how to engage students in the learning process, and how to assess the students’ understanding. It is a fulfilling process, and hope that you are enjoying my classes so far if you are taking my modules (ME2102 and ME5517). ❓ What is one piece of advice you would like to offer to ME students? ✏️ Enjoy your university life! Study hard so that you can get yourself a decent job later. Play hard and make lots of friends so that you can support each other - not only for the 4 years of your undergraduate but for your whole life. |
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