How my life is

Hi everyone! I just stumbled upon our class blog again and wow the new background looks great! More polished interface, nice :)

Well, I'm currently waiting for my final year in NUS to start. Pretty excited to choose my final year project, or maybe propose one. I have prepared a list of profs whom I feel would make good supervisors, and would want to work on something related to geotechnical engineering. Just for information, geotechnical engineering covers topics such as

• Soil mechanics (how soil behaves when subjected to loads)
  
• Foundations for structures
• Stability of slopes
• Excavations (digging soil and preventing its collapse)
  
• Embankments (placing soil in mounds)
• Groundwater movement (this is very important)
• Tunneling

I'm also doing an internship in an engineering consultant firm now. It's a small firm that specializes in handling the approval processes for construction projects. The internship lasts 12 weeks and so far, during the first 9 weeks, I am happy with what I have learnt. Hopefully I can make the last 3 weeks enriching too :)

My future plans are to start off working as an engineer. It's mainly because it does interest me and I want to learn the civil engineering trade and become good at it. But it will probably take many many years to become good, and a lot probably depends on fate as well. Is there a lot of money in civil engineering? Well, yes and no. It's a highly cyclical field, that is manipulated by governments to control the economy, so timing, luck and connections matter. It is a very diverse field, and so one could probably find a niche if one looks hard enough. And it's true, even small projects are usually in the millions of dollars, but the slices of the pie are greatly skewed, and it depends on which part of the pie you are getting.

Again, many thanks to Mun Thye for keeping this blog alive with his amusing posts. It would be nice to read anyone else's updates about their lives too!