Thursday, May 11, 2006
I believe I now know what is my desire. To attain that kind of recognized status and to be in the same echelon as the young intelligentsia. I am working at it! Nevertheless I've started to think seriously about what I want to do about my future, which university do I really want to go to? A university is a definite must.
Take a look at this.
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Engineers, the new endangered species
As a civil engineer by profession, I can tell you why this is true. Engineering is never an easy course. I remember when I was in university, I had 42 to 44 hours of lectures and laboratory hours a week. That translates to 8 hours a day: 4 hours of morning lectures and then running to the labs with your files and working till 6pm.
The Arts, Humanities and Economic undergraduates, who typically had only 12-16 hours a week, would be sipping coffee at the Union house and watching these poor engineering souls running to the lecture theatres and labs.
Best of all, close to 25 years after graduations, these non-engineering students are my bosses! They are now administrators (CEOs and COOs) of companies in which the engineers work. Even the Human Resource manager has a cosier job than the engineer.
That's not all. Who would employ a high salaried engineer these days? If I require six engineers to run my project, I would be better off employing cheaper foreigners to do the job!
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Which is so very true. Since my own profession of engineering will not get me far, I have to start branching out my skill pool. Do I have a chance in competing on the global arena?
I am a competent electronics engineer with a fair amount of experience both in design and industrial applications, strong in chemistry and biology, fluent in English, computer-literate, challenge-oriented, relatively skilled in various software and graphic design. All I need now is to build up my accolades. Unfortunately some people still think that I am stupid.
But still I managed to find time after work to go out with you-know-who. We went to town, first to Tanglin mall because we've never been there I went to see the bicycles at Treknologies and my eyes bulged at the prices, a $4k bike that was so ordinary! But they were also selling the $10k Litespeed racing bike!!! But everything was so expensive.
Anyway, after that I got mom some nice presents for mothers' day and also for her birthday, when I will not be around to celebrate with her anymore.
Then today is the last day of this really short working week, I spent 3 days in the clean room doing lithography. The first 2 wafers were incomplete because we forgot that they were titanium and not gold. And we're afraid of etching titanium because it requires HF, Hydrofluoric acid, the most dangerous kind of acid you can ever handle because the fluorine atoms readily bind to the bone molecules in your body. It will eat through your skin and you won't feel it, by the time it reaches your bone it's too late. It's dangerous, and the corrosive enough to eat through the way you see it in movies...
Come to think of it, I found it quite funny to know now that I was trying to etch Titanium with Chrome etchant, mere Nitric acid. That's really hilarious. Etch Titanium with Nitric Acid! Haha! To Titanium it's a cooling shower..
But this week is a short week, only 3 working days and all I did was lithography in the clean room, but next week is a full 5-day work week again. Anyway, after work I went to school, rather tired out but what to do. Ms Nancy showed me all the problems that the magazine had, but generally they weren't serious except for the project groups and staff photos. Still everything were praises that it's very well done and now they have a headache with a "happy problem" of having too many pages.
But that just means more work for me to do, she gave me 2 cds of more photos and a hardcopy printout of the mag first draft. The magazine comments from the staff were more raves.
Here are some sneak previews of the ECE magazine.
They will soon go to print though. Meanwhile, at least this short week is over and hello long weekend!
9:44 AM
