NUS 2024 Term 1 (Aug-Dec)

ME2134 Fluid Mechanics I

Prof Teo Chiang Juay is very entertaining if not a little too focused on entertainment sometimes. Lectures are filled with shouts and strange demonstrations that are very memorable and helped me understand concepts. Lecture is given in full Singlish slang.

CG3207 Computer Architecture

Probably one of the best courses I’ve ever taken. The crown jewel of this course is its lab – we built a RISC-V processor from scratch using a Nexys 4 FPGA with Xilinx Vivado. It was super cool taking what we learned in theory in class, combining it with the official RISC-V spec, and then writing programs in assembly that could run on this processor. Most universities have a course like this, but rarely does it actually involve implementing the theory. Super super cool, definitely recommend.

EE4032 Blockchain Engineering

This was a weird one, it didn’t feel like it was very well-organized – the lecture slides weren’t super clear, the lecture schedule wasn’t amazing either, and ~40% of the lectures were just office hours so we didn’t really learn much beyond some basic theories about blockchain. We had a final project that was the majority of the grade (no exams) where we implemented something in blockchain with Ethereum. Wouldn’t recommend.

ENPH Year 5 Term 1 (2023WT1)

MECH 325 - Machine Design

Tedious but useful class. A ton of content is pushed onto you, and most of the formulas are given without derivation. But now I think I’d have the required knowledge to build a bike from scratch. Go to tutorials!

PHYS 410 - Computational Physics

Super cool class. We learned methods for approximating PDEs when they can’t be solved numerically. Super useful for creating simulations. We simulated the collision of 2 galaxies and the 2D Schrodinger equation, both super satisfying to get working in the end.

ELEC 473 - Biomedical Micro-electrical Mechanical Systems (BioMEMS)

My favorite technical elective so far (we get to choose 4). The information is extremely dense and the average is low. But I truly feel like I’ve learned so much here. I hadn’t realized the sheer amount of engineering that goes into manufacturing biological tools. To me, it’s the perfect elective – it digs deep onto a topic that I don’t have the bandwidth to take multiple courses for. Highly highly recommend if you’ve got an interest in biology. Dr. Karen Cheung is also just a wonderful person.

APSC 450 - Engineering Ethics

Super throwaway course, it’s all online and involves weekly 10-mark quizzes (a extremely effective way to teach ethics…) The final is 30 multiple choice questions (not found on the quizzes) and is also super throwaway.

ELEC 411 - Antennas and Propagation

The content matter is interesting but I disagree with how Dr. Michelson teaches it. It feels like many classes are not used effectively, and I ultimately relied on the textbook wholly to teach me the content.

ENPH 479 - Capstone II

A second year of capstone! We’re trying to build an automated fastener sorter (as in, take pictures of a screw and automatically sort it to where it should go). I work mainly on the UI of the system. We built a prototype of the imaging component last year, and next steps are to build the conveyor system to bring screws in and out.