Host: Which short-term program did you take? How was your experience?
Me: In my first year of high school, I participated in the 2019 NUS Physics Challenge Camp conducted by the Department of Physics and NUS SCALE. During that 10-day-long research camp, we stayed in Utown, enjoyed the best campus life with NUS students and staff, relished the fantastic lectures and tutorials held by NUS Professors, and visited state-of-the-art research facilities such as the Centre for Quantum Technologies and the Center for 2D Materials, etc.
I immensely enjoyed the academic vibe and the NUS student life, so NUS became my dream university after this short-term program. I am so glad that NUS provided an opportunity for me to do research with professors, and even today, I still keep in touch with professors we meet in the program.
So, after 4 years, I am so lucky to live at NUS as an undergraduate student and walk around the campus, which I was familiar with 4 years ago.
Host: How did the course help you decide on your undergrad major?
Me: My true interest in the fields of Science and Engineering began during my participation in the Physics Challenge Camp. I still remember the question we were presented with by the professor, ‘why the dimples on a golf ball’s surface make it fly farther’. Through careful planning and trials, I was brought to the conclusion that this experiment was difficult to conduct under normal circumstances. However, this didn’t stop me from trying further. After combining ideas from articles offered from NUS Professors, I used engineering methodologies to prove this physics theory and I successfully derived dynamic equations of the drag forces experienced by a golf ball by using MATLAB and built up a laminar flow field to simulate the experiment with the aid of COMSOL Multiphysics. I finished a research report on the golf problem in my last year of my high school and I strongly feel that computer-aided modelling, an Engineering method, creates a new language to explain science, and ultimately providing theoretical solutions to extant problems.
That’s why my major is a multi-disciplinary program, which is computer engineering, and my second major is in the College of Humanities and Science, which is Data Science and Analytics.
The remaining questions have not been recorded. Please look forward to our promotional video!
