My favourite lecturers

Most of the lecturers in NUS are either lousy or average and don't leave a good impression on me or good enough for me to remember them after I graduate. With so many boring lecturers it’s no wonder that I only got 15 minutes of attention span during the lecture before I got put off by the lecturer. There are a handful of lecturers that left great impressions on me. There are also a few lecturers that scare me so much that I don't want to approach them even I don't know what they are saying about. Some of the lecturers are so boring that their lectures are a cure for insomnia. There do also lecturers which give notes that have so many Maths equations, that I have problem understand what they are saying and they didn’t give much diagrams to associate with those equations. Those good lecturers that I appreciate very much and will thank them for the enjoyable moments I have which I going to describe below.

Dr Edmund Keung teaches Financial Accounting has a Hong Kong accent and is funny bamboo stick. He used to be quite bad in Maths (gets 70 for his exams) and his mother kept comparing him with his elder sister and praises his elder sister for being smarter than him. His mother always calls him a liability and his sister an asset. He also showed something funny and unrelated to Financial Accounting in his review lecture; he compared the brain sizes of human, elephant, whale, cow and mouse. Human does have brain about 2% of his body weight which is more than those big animals so he should be smart but then the mouse have brain which is 5% of its body weight and should be smarter than a human?

Prof Chung Tai Shung Neal teaches Membrane Science and Technology. I did not attend a few of his lectures because I was too tired to go after my lab lesson. He is quite a good lecturer and an impressive researcher. His final examinations are all multiple choice and its an advantage to me since I am rather good at MCQs and manage to get a B for his subject. He did give a few valuable lessons in the working world like we should work for a supervisor or manager who earns several times more than me so that they are more likely to give a pay rise. He also say that we should quote a higher than market wage to set a high bench mark so that we will get more pay increments in the absolute terms (ie $200 pay rise from $4000 is a 5% improvement vs $150 pay rise from $2000 is a 7.5% improvement, but of course $200 pay rise is better). If we set a low benchmark then the future employers also will shortchange you. He also says about secrets of lecturers moderating the grades so as to save their jobs.

A/P Wang Chi-Hwa is one of the nerdish looking lecturers I have seen and he teaches Heat and Mass Transfer, but actually when he teaches he doesn’t show his nerdish-ness. He is definitely good in Maths and knows how to derive those heat and mass transfer but seldom asks questions that ask us to derive those equations. He wants us to learn the concepts and not the derivations behind the equations which should be those graduate students’ task to find out lah. He shows which equations are the best for various conditions like different pipe diameters and length, turbulent and laminar flows. His lecture notes are quite easy to read with many diagrams that describe various heat and mass transfer processes. Of course, he got explain the various applications of heat transfer. He is rather lenient in his grading and did give a good credit for partially correct answers as long as we don’t leave the answer blank.

Dr Yang Kun-Lin teaches Process Modeling and Stimulation and he is rather humorous. He has a strong Taiwanese accent, but he teaches rather well and he also got a post doctorate degree in chemical engineering. Although his subject is not one of my favourite subjects as it involves a lot of Maths, I am motivated to learn more Maths from him. He is one of those lecturers that can make me like the subject I used to hate. He shows how Maths can be applied to processes ranging from systems of linear equations mass and energy balance, heat and mass transfer, reaction engineering, separation processes, fluid mechanics and so on. He uses a lot of visualizations and associations in his lectures. I still remember he taught me how to associate rules by famous Mathematicians like Taylor (the tailor turn mathematician) and Simpson (the funny yellow men cartoon). Of course, he does use fortune telling to solve some chemical engineering problems. His lecture notes is easier to read than many other lecturers that teaches Maths dominant subjects. PS: Models are mathematical representation of the process; they are not the process itself.

Dr Tong Yen Wah teaches Heat and Mass Transfer, Polymer Engineering and he is also my project supervisor. He is not as humorous as Dr Yang and Dr Keung, but he has charisma, an eloquent speaker, speaks fluent English, passionate, knowledgeable and of course a nice lecturer. I find him rather approachable and polite unlike some of the older lecturers that is haughty at times, and he explains concepts well. He is a rather interactive lecturer; he asks several questions in his lecturers for students to ponder over. He is one of those lecturers which I can literally communicate with even when is conducting his lecture (like those lecturers/teaching assistant who conduct seminars). I can learn in a two way traffic process from him instead of one way (lecturer to student only). He does use visualizations often to help me remember the applications of Heat and Mass Transfer to applications like doping, dialysis machine and drug delivery systems. I just remember about the radiation from the incandescent lamp burning my face to what he said about people who can see infrared or ultraviolet radiation haha. Actually I can sense infrared lah. In the Polymer Engineering lectures he got show some live demonstrations also. (See the more recent posts I wrote about him).