A Stoke of Brilliance

This post has been a long time coming…it’s a gift to my dear readers…for I have traveled the long hard road and emerged on top…now it’s a cause for celebration… by the way, I was kidding about the ‘gift to my dear reader’, I don’t rate my blog that high anyway. So, it’s Monday, and I just finish 2 of the most grueling weeks of the semester (but expect more to come)…sigh…I have been scrambling to finish my assignments by week 6…3 were due on Monday, normally, it wouldn’t be too much to handle, but the Goliath of them all threaten to wreck havoc across my world…this assignment (transportation engineering) was the toughest challenge I ever face thus far…our objective was to suggest a geometric design for a class 2 arterial rural highway. Well, no sweat one might think, I’ve done similar assignments in surveying courses…however, this was different. Unlike previous assignments I’ve ever done…no numbers were given…just a contour and a page describing terrain and of course…class of road. This might be a drive by for your average engineer…but definitely overwhelming for a sophomore like me. I won’t go into too much detail about the mechanics of design, because I can only think of one person who will understand (hahahhaha), but the approach of the assignment was so broad…It’s like… ‘Should I do this? If I do this, would this happen? However, if I don’t do this something else might happen? But if I don’t this, that will just be ridiculous…’ so on and so on and so on….

Anyway, Serene called sometime early last week…and we chatted a bit…she probably sense my usually ice-cool demeanor starting to show cracks…I think she immediately inform the chief commander…Dad…He called not long after that, and we had a chat…I talked about some of the difficulties I was facing regarding the assignment, and he describe some of his experience dealing with geometric road design…I must say, our conversation helped…firstly it calm me down (don’t forget, I had another 2 lab reports due)…but more importantly, it helped me throw away some of the traditional high-school thinking approach to problem solving (which I’m sure we all faced that at some point in our tertiary education)…

In the end, I finish it…I lost a lot of sleep…but it’s finished…I don’t know if I did a good job…but it’s finished, and tomorrow, I’ll happily slip it into the assignment box…and that’ll be the end of 2 crazy weeks…until the next 2 crazy weeks come along. Well, the assignment was really a reality check…1) it’s always going to get harder from here on, and 2) fresh graduates will always struggle once they enter the world of engineering practice, so it’s important not to get to ahead of oneself.

The chief culprit of my misery

My worked station which looks like a natural disaster (this is after i cleaned it up)

On a lighter note…last Wednesday was the Engineering Faculty’s Dean’s Merit Induction Night…nothing too Spectacular…just an informal function, were we get to socialize…the room was packed…I barely had enough space to move around…but do take note it was a small room…so, small numbers…but one should expect that from such an exclusive ‘club’…hahahahahha, just kidding…. Anyway, I could barely hear any of the speeches…so in the end, I just slipped to the back and ate as much on trays as possible… very Malaysian.

That's Raymond on my left (the first Malaysian I met in Newey) and his genuis friend (no kidding, he scored an average of 93%)

For some reason my friend Heng is known as 'The Singapore God'

My gloating certificate