Friday, October 17, 2008

Blog Post #6 - Biodata

Updated 07 Nov 2008
I am final year undergraduate from National University of Singapore majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I like outdoor activities such as sport climbing, kayaking, windsurfing, etc.

I would like to work as an aircraft engineer in aviation industry because I like aircraft and flying. Besides, I like traveling because I like to experience myself in different cultures, different climates and different scenery from different places.

Academically, I have been doing well in engineering design and was awarded the best performance in engineering design module in Ngee Ann Polytechnic. I have involved in several design projects such as Automatic Bean Sprout Root Removal and Harvesting Machine, Vibrating Alarmed Pillow, Low Cost Pick and Place Arm and Microthruster for Unmanned Air Vehicle or Spacecraft.

Sometimes I find myself too wary to take in new ideas and hence it stops me from taking potential ideas that could enhance and improve the results. Therefore, I think I can improve myself by having even solid and complete information for a new idea in advance to minimize the possible risks that may occur afterward.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Blog Post #5 - Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

I have to thank everyone in ES2007S from my group and especially cooperation from my teammates and guidance from Mr. Brad. I am strongly agree that this is really a positive experience for me to learn and to improve myself in terms of communication skill, report writing skill, teamwork, and time management.

In our first meeting, we discussed and filtered the ideas to generate a final idea for our research topic. From that, we came to the final decision to choose the topic of "Green Campus" as our research topic. However, "Green Campus" was too general and hence we made our topic became more precise by focusing our scopes within water and energy related topics. We were not only discussed on our research topic during the meetings, but we also shared the joy of eating snacks. :P

From the report writing, I have learnt citation and quotation of external sources as we had been taught of the serious consequences of plagiarism from Mr. Brad and hence I have properly cited and quoted from the sources and generated a proper APA style references in our research report.

In my opinion, the most tedious job in this report writing was the literature review which i think it was quite time-consuming. Our sources are mainly come from the online journals, online articles, online information, as well as books from our NUS Central Library. It spent me more than 1 week to screen through all these sources to search for related information. It brought me a pair of sore eyes and numb fingers due to long hours "googling".

However, I felt the sense of fulfillment once i could extract all the related information and pass it to my groupmates for further process for our report. Trust, respect, and understanding are the most important elements in our group, we trust each other once we passed the report for further process after one's job was done. We respected and understood one's situation through the whole process which finally led us to the success of our printed finalized report. The coordination between us was so appreciable and this is also one of the key elements in a group work.

During the whole process, our report were always under stringent supervision from Mr. Brad in every ES2007S tutorials. He reviewed each of our draft reports and ensured our mistakes and errors made in the report were minimized by providing his professional and technical advice. From that, we were able to learn from mistakes and we made improvements for our report writing.

Finally it is HERE our printed report to be ready for submission on Monday. Last but not least, i would like to say thank you again to my teammates and Mr. Brad.