CNY gathering with ex-coursemates

It was an anual get-together for my Chemical Engineering ex-coursemates in UM. There were altogether 8 of us attending and these 8 of us are currently working in Klang Valley.

I still remember there were about 60 over students enrolled into UM Chemical Engineering, one of the four top favourite courses among engineering students in UM (the other three are Civil and Structural Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, with Electrical Engineering was always the most popular engineering course, judging from the number of top students competing for a place in the course. It is not longer the same story after a few years graduated from UM when I heard from my juniors that Chemical Engineering, being the only engineering course recognised by Institute of Chemical Engineers England, IChemE, has indeed emerging as the top favourite course in UM Faculty of Engineering.)

Anyway, it was a nice gathering as one of my coursemate who is serving as a Process Safety Engineer with a leading Oil & Gas consulting firm that she enjoys the chat although we only meet once a year.

If I am not mistaken, we had a total of 23 Chinese students, two did not turn up to register with UM (guess they must have a better offer from other university), one switch to UM Pharmacy as Chemical Engineering was not her first choice. So, after one-week orientation, we have only 20 Chinese students (10 males and 10 females - just nice for 10 pairs of couples, right?)

So, we struggled through the crazy course for three years. We always have to rush for our assignments, tutorials and small projects. With a course that is suppose to be finished in four years squezzed into three years, you can hardly imagine if we have enough time to digest what we learnt from our lecturers.

I was the class-rep for these three years and until now I cannot forgot the challenging experience when I representing the students to talk or negotiate with lecturer for longer time frame to finish our assignment, especially for our final year thesis. Not to mention the hustle when I always had to ride my bike all the way from UM Third College to rush to Section 17, PJ to get all the tutorial notes done and ready for distribution before lectures started. For that to be done, I had to always chase the lecturers for notes of course.

Now all of us had graduated for years, and everyone of us are working in different areas. Some are dealing with water treatment, engineering consultancy, instrumentation, process controls, sales, oleochemicals, electronics industry as well as doing further studies.

To all of them, I wish them good luck and bright future!