Madlab

After 1 and almost a half years of study in NTU, my preliminary fears are finally put to rest. The path that was chosen so hastily and impulsively in the start is beginning to look like a more intriguing path that is as satisfying. I am equally sure that I would have loved mathematics or physics as a pure subject and even more so love the Imperial College education given its prestige and undoubted ranking in the recent Times Education survey of universities. Both paths would have been chosen with the passion within but more importantly, this path will lead me to create something out of nothing. To build something from nothing. To engineer. To me right now, it is becoming ever more fascinating that I see all the building blocks of secondary and junior college education put together with the rigorous work of the would-have-been-me counterparts in the pure subjects department all link back to the world and everything that we use today. More importantly, I am beginning to relate to everything engineering has offered the world that most frequently goes sniggered upon by the 'Arts-tists'. And yet they adore the Apple world. Behind that age of packaging comes the glorious engineering and everything that WE DO.

Engineering is now a major blood in my life I guess. Year 2 stuff is totally different now where we apply all the tools and concepts that were learnt through our foundation years to construct, plan, design, test and engineer something out of nothing. Or to fix, repair, modify something that failed. Instead solving ODEs plainly in exams, we now see how ODEs help to model flight dynamics and flight paths and through that fundamental theory, we solve it to yield our theoretical systems and see how different inputs affect our output. Now we see something from nothing. My tutee's Dad asked me to 'teach my daughter the application of maths to the real world' and before he could finish the sentence, his daughter cut in with this 'how to use sin, cos and integration in real life'. Now I know even down to the simple adaptors we use, florescent tubes, chairs we sit on, laptops we type on, they all tell us the story behind the trigo and calculus we learn.
I was handed a matlab assignment earlier this semester to my disgust but yet after much playing around, I started to like this really powerful program that can make an engineer go crazy. Wonderful creation. And here's some of the work I did on modelling a flight path and the parameters relating to it. It may still be year 1 stuff but at least it tells a much bigger story now.
I know I am pretty good at solving equations and now I am trying to look beyond logic and see many problems with intuition and feel. While the logic part will always creeep up behind an engineer subconsciously, it is good to start learning how to feel things the way they are meant to feel as well.
But whatever it is, I would just like to tell my audience that it is much satisfying and motivating to look at something that you are studying or will be studying and say hey it gives me meaning in my life - to each his definition of what that means, engineering may not be your life. That is what keeps people going and keeps people striving. Till today, I am also starting to solve the chicken and egg question of whether you like a subject because you are good in it or you are good in a subject because you like it. No prizes for guessing my swayed conclusion now but hey, believe me. Figure out something you like, you will be really good at it even if there are no quizzes, tests and stuff. It is from within. And that is priceless.

no regrets.
one day i'd still be in imperial/caltech/MIT
catch me.