Engineering You're Hired! 2016

By Hui Choo (Tris)

Engineering You’re Hired (EYH) is a one week programme where penultimate year students from various engineering disciplines come together to work on the projects they have chosen. The aim of EYH is to let the students to obtain skills and gain experience through working in a diverse team (group of 6) on a real-life project. Last year we had a similar programme called Global Engineering Challenge (GEC), EYH differs from GEC is that we were left on our own most of time for group discussion.

My project is Sleep Monitoring System for Diabetic Children. Basically we have to come up with a new/improved sleep monitoring system for children with Type 1 diabetics. This system has to be able to monitor changes in blood sugars and detect early symptoms of falling blood glucose before it reaches a critically low level.  

On the first day, we had some engaging activities to get to know the members in our hub. All my group members were from different departments and they were really friendly! During group discussion we had to do more research about such devices and brainstorm various ideas for the product. At the end of every day there was a boardroom meeting where we had to present our daily progress to the demonstrator and the Professor in charge of hub. They could be quite harsh at times but their questions and advice pointed to areas that we missed out and this allowed us to improve the product.

Various flip charts on our research. They are used for our board meeting.

Throughout the week, there were quite a lot of things to do. We had to research, come up with a design, develop our idea and finalising our design. At the end of each day, there was a Q&A session, where the questions are the kind that companies might ask during applications/interviews. Towards the end of the week, we had to work on our report and final presentation. On the last day, we had to pitch our idea to the board of directors to convince them to invest in our product.

One of the group pitching their product

This engineering week was a tiring yet fulfilling yet week. My group was happy with the outcome as we were awarded for the best “pitch for funding” (though we feel there were other groups that were better than us!). I gained some experiences as well as broadening my social circle. This is definitely something that I can share with my employers for future application.