化工系竞争激烈，读起来不容易，下面转帖共鸣一下吧。
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I think i can add some thoughts into this. I am from NUS chem eng, last year last sem. I was a top student from my jc albeit from a mid level one. I practically sleep through my lectures and tutorial but i managed to do ok.. Well enough to get into nus chem eng. My year was the first batch for ntu chem eng. So no one knew what to expect but i did went down and talk to the prof at ntu. The reply he gave me was he would ensure no 1 will fail the course.. Oh well, at tt time i was still young n a bit full of myself i guess.. so i chose nus instead thinking its more of a challenge.
All i can say is nus chem eng is one stressful journey. Endless amount of design projects, presentations and tests. we had to design a heat exchanger using excel from scratch for my heat mass transfer module and a reactor for reaction kinetics... all was without any simulation program like hysys. for those who know..this requires crazy number of equations n stuff.. really crazy stuff and we are left on our own for all the projects... but i guess at the end of the day, i did learn a lot even though i never did well for any of my core modules. i am a 2nd lower by the way. i truly respect the 1s class and 2nd upper.. they are seriously smart ppl who i believe are not any inferior to those from imperial... actually i also applied to imperial and got a place... just tt i did not have the money to go.. more importantly, the cut off for imperial is not any better than nus for the locals...
the exams in nus chem eng is very hard.. just be prepared mentally. i remembered one poignant scene when i was in year 1.. i came out of the exam hall having only done like 25% of the paper and having a serious headache.. i was in serious self doubt thinking about how stupid i actually was and how i am going to answer to my parents.. then i chance upon my coursemates with rows of the girls all in tears... if i had not know better i would have thought someone just died.. i guess it just too much of a shock for them.. never in their life they did so badly for a papers (most are rjc/HCJC straight As students).. NUS chem eng is not so out of touch with the industries.. all our modules are always changing to keep in touch with the industry. some even are taught by guest lectures from the industry.. i even had one project where it was conducted by a engineering design firm (the heat exchanger). So i guess overall we are not tt bad.. as some make it out to be..
I do not know much about ntu so i cant comment much but i can share what i heard from my friends there. the industrial attachment in nus is not graded but ntu is (no bell curve, hard to fail, hard to give bad grades too) my friends all had As for it.. 10 modular credits for ntu and 12 for nus. the fyp in nus is bell curved but ntu apparently is not unless they changed since my friend era. (same as industrial attachment). anyway because of these 2 modules, my friend managed to pull up to a higher honours.
So ultimately the choice is yours. the industrial do not care which uni you come from basically, they are more concern about your class so if u have the money maybe Australia is a good idea. My friends who cant even make it to any courses here are doing very well there. One is even a first class in chem eng and he never stop bragging about it.. i do not regret coming to nus because i am sure if i can survive here.. i most probably can survive anywhere. tts the confidence i have.. i even went sep and i can tell u.. its slack in europe.. haha.. the only regret is probably my grades i guess... n that the employers do not care which uni you come from.
To get into petrochem or refineries, u need at least a 2nd upper n hope for the best.. last thing, the last time i heard, they took away the design projects for most modules leaving only the actual design project module for the later batches cause we complained its too much. so i guess it will be better life for you if you do come in. hope my inputs help. cheers
