e-Portfolio 4: English, our partner

Topic: English language competence is a significant aspect of an engineering student’s academic life and prospective career.


When we, year one students, first submitted our applications to NUS, we already knew that we would not use our mother tongue languages as a tool for study anymore. It is English, instead. The chosen one, English, got its position through a flow of history. Consequently, it becomes a significant aspect of our academic lives and prospective careers.

English is used for most academic materials in the world. Books at our libraries are among the evidences which prove that authors prefer English as their language for publication. International schools and universities use English as their teaching language. We use English books as references and write English in our researches and reports for a convenient cause that readers can easily review and understand. If we do research in our home countries (China, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, etc), we need to translate it into English for worldwide publication. In short, our academic lives get no limitation with the help of English competence.

English follows us even after we get a career. For an engineer, graduating does not mean stopping studying. We still need to observe documents relating to our works. We need to improve our knowledge about issues we’ll be working on. Above all others, we need to interact with our partners, communicate with international colleagues. And again, English comes as a helpful and consistent tool serve our needs. English is considered as a common point for communication. We cannot work efficiently without some extent of proficiency in English. As an engineer, we treat English as a partner in work.

In conclusion, English language competence plays an important role in our trips. We need it for our academic lives as well as our future careers. Take its advantage and go on!

i think it is indeed true that English-the language of the world -is very important to engineering students's future career.
one of the misconceptions is that engineering students do not need as much proficiency in English language as those students from Arts or business. Initially, I actually had this misconception as well. However, through the course of the study, i gradually realise that English language is very significant to engineering students' academic studies . In the future, we may work together with different people from all over the world. Thus, it is very crucial to make our ideas or perspectives clear to others, especially during the design processes.
Therefore, by realising the importance of English language, not only for academic studies and prospective career, but also for daily communications, we should continue to put in effort to improve our language skills.

On The English Language

"The English language is a very significant aspect of an engineering student's academic life and prospective career."

I do not intend this last blog entry to be another argumentative essay. I guess we already intuitively know the arguments for and against that statement- on where (in our lives) the English language would be greatly needed, and the possibilities for other languages as a medium of thought and expression. For a typical Singaporean student like me, I believe that the English language would be very significant, if not mandatory, if we wish to continue beyond university and into the workforce. English is Singapore's first language, it's the language we use for trade, research, education and development.
As we know, many engineering graduates actually do not end up working in their field of study. Beyond the politically correct answers that 'English would be the qualitative counterpart to the engineering language" (Mathematics accounts for the quantitative aspect), we must still account if English is still significant to the student even if his prospective career is radically different. To this, we must of course focus back on the nature of language again.

Psychology has defined the English more than just a means of thought expression. Language has been the reason for human success and dominance, since it brings together individuals to work in cohesion and to a common development. Moreover, the English language in itself is a synthesis of various older languages, bringing together conceptual representations of various cultures into one unified language. From here, we can see that such unity would be crucial for life, since life is about development.

Now, if we were to empirically define the concept of 'the hard sciences', we find that these sciences are actually evidences and excerpts of our human success and development. It is on this basis we concluded (in the first post) that the prupose of engineering and technology is for human improvement. From here we could make a direct integration of English as a language of development and the hard sciences as a form of development and conclude that these two disciplines are very closely related.

However, we can still go beyond this premise-conclusion to see that English is more than just for academics and prospective careers in engineering. From the above, we see that the English language defines us for who we are. We use English to convey personal emotions, enjoy works of litrature (the movie review), and share our opinions. While these have little to do directly with the hard sciences, we see that they too have a lot to do with our future prospects. And to all the students who do not wish to pursue a career in the hard sciences, we can now see how English is still significant in all their future endeavours.

Be it a researcher in a lab, a teacher in a class, or a student in a library. English has proven its worth in all domains of our lives- be it in the development of knowledge in Science and Engineering, or in the 'softer' areas of our lifestyle and well-being. Our future success and prospects will depend greatly on these alphabets I type today, not only as an engineer, but rather as a human being- altogether.

E-portfolio 3: An intepretation of integration, rather than a balanced review

I thought that the agenda for e-portfolio 3 was a rather interesting one. For once, we were allowed to go to SELF and review on an article or film that we liked. This comes as a rather pleasant suprise, since it breaks the monotony of mathematics and engineering-related topics we had been ploughing through for the past 3 months. There ought to be a sort of balance between work and rest, we often say- just as there ought to be a balance between the sciences, the arts, and our ethics.

Balance- How is it possible to balance contradictory doctrines to life and yet retain our integrity along the way? On one hand we are encouraged to be designers, innovators and entrepernuers for the improvement of humanity; on the other hand lies the risk of us getting carried away and losing our humanity in the process. After all, as we distinguish work from play, and personal identity from social norms, just as how we have divided physics from sociology, we find that it becomes increasingly difficult to re-unite them together into one coherent intuition called life.

Incidentally, there was a movie I had watched that speaks about the same lines. The movie was titled 'Equilibrium', and from the title we already roughly know where the director is coming from, and going to. Basically, Equilibrium speaks of a post apocalyptic civilization determined not to follow the footsteps of its predecessing civilizations. Realizing that the human emotion was responsible for man's inhumanity to man, that civilization decrees a doctrine of emotional ban and suppression.

In the movie we get to follow the journey of the protagonist, raised by 'logic', and slowly learning about the truth, beauty and goodness about human emotions via his frequent contact with the rebels. During the acquisition process he gets too emotional momentarily, and was depicted to be 'weak' and 'illogical'. However, what captured my attention was that towards the end of the movie, the protagonist finally manages to integrate both factual logic and intuitive emotions into a being far superior than both the government (of the civilization) and the rebels.

For me, the take-away for the day was the concept of 'integration'. Balance does not mean proportioning contrasting subjects into equal proportions and subsequently trying to live them all together at once. It does not constitute an hour of soulless studying, then another hour of mindless gaming immediately after-- such a lifestyle would be one of utter madness, no different from one of bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia. Rather, I believe that just as the movie had interpreted, and the agenda of 'e-portfolio 3' had implied: to 'integrate' both relaxation and work, just as logic and emotions, or even the self and the community, together as one.

...A possible integration such that this blog review itself does not merely become another English homework, but also as a form of personal expression and relaxation.

Of course, as what the title of this post states, such interpretations are no more than subjective whims. But in my opinion, and hopefully the opinion of the director of the movie 'Equilibrium', we can see that life is more than a singular goal-orientated drive to a certain success in a certain domain. But a rather a harmonious blend of what we conventionally call 'the opposites'. After all, it's a fact that beauty actually arises from unity and moderation, rather than from complexity and division.

Movie reviews

The movie ' Schindler's List' is one of my favourite wartime movie. The main plot is about Schindler, a German businessman who saved the livies of 1100 Polish Jews during the World War II by employing them in his factory. Schindler was a member of the National Socialist Party and had a lavish life. He opened his factory as a war profiteer and employed the Jews who were cheaper labours. However, there were more and more orders from the Nazi Party to send the remaining Jews in the city to the concentration camps.Originally, his intentions were to making money, but as time passed, he begined ordering his assistant to save as many lives as possible. So he spent much of his money bribing the Nazi officials to save "his" workers, Jewish women and the innocent children as well. He finally comprised as many Jewish workers as possible in his " list" and shifted them to a safe site. When the war ended, the Jews were liberated from the factories.

The most touching part of the movie is the ending where Schindler and his wife were leaving the factory as he ran out of money and the war also ended in Europe. He bid farewell to his workers who were very grateful for what he had done to save their lives. They gave him a letter, explaining he was not a war criminal, together with a ring secretly made by the workers with the quotation" whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Schindler was deeply touched but regreted as he felt that he could have done more to save more innocent lives.

The movie is a reflection of the humanity during the war time. Human beings may lose their rationales. Some people might become senseless killers while some people are trying their best to save any innocent lives. After the war, there were fewer than 4000 Jews living in Poland . Many of them were the decendants of the Schindler's Jews. Even till now, many of these Jewish decendants are still very grateful of what he had done.

Therefore, we should appreciate the peaceful life that we have today and should not take it for granted. They human relationship may become especially fragile during the war times.