photos with Professors and TA

This afternoon, Jon and myself went to visit our professors and teaching assisstants (TA) to take photos with them and to give them each a small souvenir (keychain) from Singapore. However, some are not in their office, like Krist (Process Control Professor), Ravindran (2nd TA of Process Control) and Sidsel (Model Analysis TA). We have many lecturers for Petroleum Engineering, so we did not get to interact much with each one of them, hence we are not close to any of them, so we did not find them. :)

I am most thankful to Albert (TA for Process Control) because he really helped us a lot for the 2 assignments and for all in-class exercises. He's Spanish and a phD student in DTU. I believe he will make a very good teacher/lecturer next time because his explanations are very clear and good.

We may see our Separation Process professor, Rafiqul Ghani in Singapore next year because he said he will go to NUS for some Chemical Engineering Seminar or something like that. I will be very happy if I see him in NUS.

Erwin asked me to take more photos of DTU Campus, so I just took a quick photo when going around the campus looking for the professors and TA.

Anyway, here are the photos.....

photo with Albert, our favourite TA
photo with Rafiqul Ghani, Separation Process Professor

photo with Adeel (TA for Petroleum Engineering)

photo with Zakir (TA for Petroleum Engineering)

Yui Chi's B'day and Our Last Dinner

Today we celebrated Yui Chi's 25th birthday. He doesn't like to be reminded of his age, but we still purposely put 25 Danish flags on his birthday cake. :) It is our last dinner together as a container family because Artur, our Polish friend, will leave tomorrow for Poland. We are all very sad at the thought of parting. I can still remember the first day I moved into Campus Village on 25th August 2008 and Artur was the first guy who greeted us and invited us to join him and his buddies to the supermarket. His help and advice helped us greatly in assimilation. I will never forget this friend. I wish him all the best in his life and I hope that we will meet again someday in our life, whether in Poland or in Singapore or anywhere else in the world.


When my exam ends on 17th Dec, Jon and myself will also leave for our trip to Stockholm, Estonia and the rest of Scandinavia, and when we come back, all would have left Denmark, except Bryan who will be on exchange for 1 year here. It is really sad that time pass so fast and now we have to part. We are really close as a family compared to other containers because we travelled together, talked to each other almost everyday about anything under the sun. Sarah is the only friend in the container who never once joined us for dinner. I've lost count on the number of dinners we had together already. We will never know when in life we will all meet again, but we did made an agreement that we should, one day, all of us meet somewhere in the world, bringing our husband/wife/children in the future. Ahh.... I will miss each one of my container friends, they are just like my family members in Denmark.

Yesterday, we had a formal farewell dinner for Artur with his other friends. His friend, Cengiz left me with the deepest impression. He is Danish by citizenship, but Turkish by origin. He came to our container a couple of times to prepare dinner for his buddy group, and I interacted with him quite a bit. He's a very helpful, mature, gentlemanly and friendly guy. He's always symphathetic to all his friends who shared their problems with him. He graduated with a phD from DTU and now he is working and he lives in Helsingborg (Sweden). Even so, he comes back to DTU often to help and befriend exchange students. For this, I give him my utmost respect.


Just now, Lucia also asked me to go for a meal together with Jon because we will not see each other again after I left for my trip because she will go back to Spain and come back to Denmark only maybe in Febraury when we have already returned to Singapore. There is a Chinese saying which my dad used to use to console me which goes like this, "Shi4 Shang4 mei2 you3 bu4 san4 de4 yan4 xi2", which means there is no gathering in this world that will not end in parting (forgive me for my bad translation because it is harder to translate Chinese sayings). This also reminds me of the Buddhist teachings on Impermanance. All compounded things are meant to decay, strive hard for spiritual happiness, rather than worldly ones.

Anyway, here are the photos for the 2 dinners (Artur's farewell and Yui Chi's birthday). I baked the cake (banana cake) for Yui Chi's birthday. It was my first time and I'm relieved that it turn out well and good. :)

Banana Cake (before)
Banana Cake (after)

my first Banana Cake. :)

Salad

Initially, we used 25 candles, but they start to melt due to the heat from the cake. So we used 25 Danish Flags instead

25 Danish flags with one Japanese Flag since Yui Chi is Japanese

Beef Lasagna

Chicken Lasagna, prepared especially for me since I don't eat beef

Christmasy chocolates
my container family members

Yui Chi, the Birthday boy

Yui Chi cutting the cake

The Banana cake

Yui Chi and Bryan

From front: Paul, Inga and Jon

Peter from Iceland (left) and Patrice from Latvia (right)

Artur

Carrot cake baked by Cengiz the day before

myself with Cengiz

The dinner Cengiz prepared

Turkish Salad

2 Exams done, 1 more to go

I just came back from a 4 hours Process Control Exam. I am very happy and relieved. The exam was very easy, I can actually finish it in 2 hours, but I took 3 and a half hours to beautify my answers and to check for any careless mistakes. If I didn't do any careless mistakes, I am confident that I can get full marks for the exam. I'm not boasting, it's true. Haha... For the exam, it was open book and we were ALLOWED TO BRING IN LAPTOP! This is really a luxury which NUS Students never get to enjoy. There were no internet connection though, but you can use Matlab or Maple or any other programs you have to check your answers. I had my Matlab ready before the exam, but at the end, I didn't use it because all calculations are relatively simple and can be done by hand. Luckily, they didn't ask us to plot the Nyquist Diagram (this was past year question). I have the program to plot Bode Diagram in my Matlab, but I did not write the program for plotting Nyquist Diagram, the program codes were given in the lecture notes, but I have never tried the codes before. And Bode Diagram was actually given in the exam, that makes life so much simpler. :)

One thing I find peculiar about the exam is that we have to write our date of birth on our answer script. It really makes me wonder, why do they need our birthdate information? As far as I know, people taking the course can be of very different ages. For example, Erez is 6 years older than me and Jon is 1 year older than me. But still, I don't see the point of writing our birthdate on exam answer script, unless we are graded differently based on our age, which of course doesn't make any sense and it's unfair.

Yesterday, I had another exam too-oral exam for Chemical Engineering Model Analysis. In my opinion, the exam was a waste of time. Basically, the professor, Alex, just wrote me a partial differential equation, then asked me to tranform it into dimensionless form. It is really a brainless work, you just have to know what dimensionless parameters to introduce, then the rest are just secondary school algebraic manipulations. He gave me 15 minutes, but I finished in 5 minutes. The prof looked at my answer, then he said "ok, you passed!", then he laughed. And I laughed too.... I have never had such an easy exam in my life before. It is really lame, but I'm happy. Haha...

My last exam will be next Wednesday (17th Dec). It is also 4 hours exam on Petroleum Engineering. I have not studied anything for this subject. haha... so you can see how lazy and playful I am in Denmark. In fact, I studied for Process Control only at the last minute, because when I came back from Switzerland, I had to work on one last assignment and I only studied seriously after that last assignment was submitted. I'm glad the exams was easy and given my minimal amount of effort this semester, I am more than satisfied already. :)

Before the 4 hours exam today, I went with Jon to Prof Alex's office to take photos with him. He's really a nice guy. He's from Moscow, Russia, but he has lived in Denmark for the past 15 years. He invited Jon and me to come back to DTU next time to do our phD. I told him I have 3 years bond with Singapore government because of tuition grant which I signed. He said, "well, government and situations can change, you can look at DTU websites and be updated about our phD projects and you can come back if you are interested." I feel very honoured by his invitation, but I guess it is very unlikely that I will come back. I still prefer to live in Asia than in Europe unless Erwin comes with me. :) Erwin asked me to register together for NUS Chemical Engineering Master Program after we graduate, but I told him I have enough of Chemical Engineering. I also told him that if we come to Europe with our Bachelor's Degree with Honours, it is equivalent to Masters level and we can skip Master program and do our phD right away. Well, I will see how things go in the future, it's too early to tell now.

Here are 4 photos....

myself with Professor Alexander Shapiro
myself at the exam hall. Comfortable chair, big table and laptop allowed. :)

Jonathan and Byeong Jun getting ready for exam. My Matlab ready for the exam. :)Lunch at DTU canteen. Don't ask me how much they cost. They are expensive by Singapore standard. :) But I'm happy. They have only beef and vegetarian lasagna for the day's menu and since I don't eat beef, I can only order vegetarian lasagna.

Paris photos