Mashiat

When I was 11, it wasn’t water that damaged my mother’s red transistor radio. I just wanted to see the speaker inside it, and the capacitors, and the antennas. When kids my age would collect stamps and Pokémon cards, I’d collect circuits, chips and tiny motors from inside whatever appliances I found in the house. Ever since I started understanding the inner workings of the world, I’ve had an insatiable need to continuously challenge myself in building and breaking things. I say it is a challenge because it’s actually pretty difficult to successfully break things apart – the art of which is something I began to acknowledge and appreciate more when I transferred to the School of Engineering a year ago.

Despite my specific interests in electronics and technology, I came to HKUST not knowing exactly what I wanted to study. On one hand, I wanted to write beautiful code and work with electronics; on the other hand, I wanted to do something more human-centered and practical beyond the world of theories and equations. Having had the opportunity of taking a wide array of courses and extra-curricular programs over my first year, I finally found my calling in Integrative Systems and Design. Here, all my courses are hands-on. We not only go through the whole journey of understanding users to design for them, but we also actually get to create software and hardware innovations that might possibly be implemented in the real world.

Being someone who’s gone through the process of being an exploratory fresher to finding passion in a specific sector of engineering, I hope to share my journey with more students trying to find their niche in the School of Engineering community. The amount of resources and opportunities HKUST provides to encourage hands-on learning is unbelievable – it’s just a matter of time and will before you can avail them all!