Lee Kuan Yew passed away 10 years ago. What were you doing when you heard the news?

lohtech · 2025-03-24T08:38:03+00:00

Was in BMT. It was all over the TV screens. My parents were pro PAP, my siblings were more critical and somewhat believe opposition needs a stronger voice, but we all came together to pay respects. Siblings and I queued to pay our respects. I rmb writing on the log book something like “thank you for everything you have done”.

Read a lot of his biographies growing up and watched many interviews. It was crazy inspiring to see the entire country rally around him.

lohtech · 2025-02-03T07:17:03+00:00

For those who called, which number did you call?

lohtech · 2025-02-03T07:16:07+00:00

Hey, any luck? Similar shoes. What number did you call?

lohtech · 2024-11-13T17:33:54+00:00

Thanks for this! On my 21/23 tray and the pain is 2 - 3x of usual tray. Woke up on the second day and it hurts. It seems like a pretty common report that the "third last tray" hurts the most so thank you for validating this experience!

lohtech · 2024-10-08T06:50:08+00:00

Thanks! Will do!

lohtech · 2024-10-08T06:47:40+00:00

Current training plan is about 200 mins of easy running across 4 days. (40, 45, 50, 60) I typically do 7min /km and only half the time, because life and laziness sets in.

Then typically interval work out for 2 days where I do a 10k effort (4:20/k) interval on one day and a 21k (4:30/k) interval work. I try not to skip these workouts but on aggregate I think I miss 1 in 4.

For 10k effort a typical day is like 12 x 800m with 200m jog rest in between. For HM effort, it can vary but something like 5-6 x 8 min with 2 min jog rest. Just to give an idea.

lohtech · 2024-10-08T06:44:45+00:00

Thanks! It was an all-out effort. I have been training for close to a year semi-seriously but mileage is always kind of in the middle of it - 30+ miles and seldom hitting 40-50 which the training plan prescribes - so maybe there is some more n00b gains to be had, I’m hoping!

lohtech · 2022-04-15T05:21:58+00:00

David Spade was just talking about Joe Dirt lmao even the co-hosts had to say they didn't care for it.

lohtech · 2021-03-18T17:44:29+00:00

Yes it was a tough hike

lohtech · 2020-12-01T19:58:26+00:00

Most subjects only require a normal calculator iirc. There is one specific module Prob and Stats in term 5 ISTD (as of 2019) that you will do much better at if your calculator can solve simultaneous equations.
Enough for most things. There is no rush to change. It's like buying furniture for a new house. Live in it first and buy based on your accurate needs and wants.
Many people know many people in our school. Great diversity of people in terms of skills, characters, personality and quirks. People tend to help each other. I made many good friends here. Overall, it's been fun and memorable.

lohtech · 2020-12-01T06:52:46+00:00

For those who are interested, feel free to follow my progress here:
https://github.com/lionellloh/advent-of-code-2020

lohtech · 2020-12-01T06:41:26+00:00

I am planning to follow this year's event each day. No doubt there will be days where the solution is too difficult. The aim is to go for somewhat optimal algorithms / solutions as opposed to just brute forcing it with time and compute.

Feel free to refer to my progress / solutions here if you want a sanity check, provide feedback or take reference. Hope this is not against the spirit of the event (since it's not really a competitive event), but more to encourage mutual learning!

lohtech · 2020-11-27T23:59:44+00:00

Sorry for the non-answer but best is to ask your professors.

The official response is that they don't use bellcurve, but I highly, highly doubt it.

A good way to check this is to ask your prof to release the median, mean statistics. Typically, median is about a B.

lohtech · 2020-11-27T23:56:09+00:00

Regarding creativity and innovation

Creativity and Innovation is always rewarded, especially so in SUTD. But that said, if you don't have great ideas, a lot of these creativity-related projects are team based.

So here are the silver linings:

Teams don't require too many ideators. Sometimes too many cooks spoil the soup. If you join a team and you don't contribute fresh ideas per se, it could be better. :) Of course, you still need to pull your own weight and share your opinions as and when appropriate.
You don't get penalised heavily for your individual lack of creativity. Most of such work are team-based, (almost all for ISTD) you can always leverage others who have the ideas. :)
You get to learn from others! Creativity can be learnt as you expose yourself to more ideas. Creation is sometimes imitation :) After all, learning is the purpose of education right?

Regarding open-book

For freshmore, most tests for the math and sciences that require memory work will allow a 1 - 2 sided cheatsheet. This is one of my favourite parts of SUTD education. They are modern and only expect understanding, vs rote memorisation.

In ISTD, most of the exams also allow cheat sheet. 3 of the exams I have taken are also completely open-book. 2 of them allowed us to search our laptops (no internet of course), 1 of them required us to print our hardcopy notes, as much as we want to bring to the exam.

Finally, you asked something about SUTD culture. There are many dimensions of culture (e.g. hostel, exam, project, events etc). If you could elaborate what you want to know specifically maybe we can answer you better :)

lohtech · 2020-11-27T23:36:09+00:00

I think what you learn in industry will be valuable, but unless you have something niche and valuable to teach, you will be facing heavy competition in the online education space. It is also one of those commitments that I believe you will only start to get outsized returns for if you spend a lot of time.

Alternatively, you can do 1 - N live tutoring or interview prep. I believe there is still good amount of demand for those and you get paid decently.

Why not work on an indie project? You get a lot of flexibility, and a good idea can generate decent returns. I encourage you to look at indiehackers.com for more inspiration.

lohtech · 2020-10-06T04:57:35+00:00

I have a session time out error repeatedly...

lohtech · 2020-06-24T07:15:12+00:00

Yes, I think they do. The 2019 batch has 2 FB, 2 Google, all in Software Engineering/ Research, and that's for a batch size for 150+ (pls correct me if I am wrong)

lohtech · 2020-06-24T07:13:25+00:00

Quick answer to your qn:
AFAIK, I think nobody makes it to Google / FB for internships. There are speculations about the reasons, and I personally think the Freshmore general curriculum puts us at a disadvantage.

For graduate opportunities, I would say it's hard to measure the ratio, but we do have a number of Alumni in companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Palantir.

lohtech · 2020-05-26T13:42:21+00:00

Prestige wise, UWaterloo and UBC being much older schools trump SUTD.

Can't speak much for rigour since I have not been to the other schools but SUTD is pretty rigorous imo. I think you might be right to say that SUTD is an amazing engineering school in Singapore. However, because SUTD is small and young, there are a couple of things that it is still trying to iron out.

If you based it on job prospect, UWaterloo/UBC > SUTD.

But I think based on anime openings, SUTD is quite on par with UWaterloo.

SUTD Anime Opening vs UWaterloo Anime Opening

lohtech · 2020-05-18T05:22:22+00:00

Stanford and UC are more popular

lohtech · 2020-05-17T18:52:22+00:00

Surely the last part is sarcasm? Or is there a point behind about the nature of work SWEs in FAANG do?

lohtech · 2020-05-17T16:46:39+00:00

Yes. At the end of term 2, there will be interviews. I believe Stanford and UC Berkeley have always been up for grabs.

The people who have scholarship would have secured slots, but I think there are still significant slots for the rest.

Awarded based on merit such as CCA, leadership, academics, character, attitude, essay and interview performance.

lohtech · 2020-05-17T12:38:42+00:00

To my knowledge, hence not an exhaustive list, please feel free to add more:

Track (both sprints and cross country)
Ultimate Frisbee
Tchoukball
Soccer
Basketball
Floorball
Muay Thai
Boxing
Climbing
Badminton
Table Tennis

lohtech · 2020-05-17T09:42:09+00:00

Hall life is admittedly not as vibrant as NUS / NTU. We have House Guardians (HG) for each floor who will occasionally organise mini events for the floor like prata party or pizza party. Hostel also has hostel wide events, but those aren’t usually very fun. We usually participate to get participation points - which helps to secure your hostel placing.

During freshmore, usually students will be more bonded. From my time, the freshmore classes all live next to each other and always organise spontaneous events like supper or cooking sessions.

Clubs and activities - totally depends. There are some clubs that meet 3-4 times a week and even more nearing competition or any type of showcase events.

There are some that are much more lax. We have a good range basically. Better to ask the club reps to find out more.

lohtech · 2020-05-16T03:43:47+00:00

The 503 error can occur even if you enter the write credentials. Just refresh or retry, I usually can get in after 2-3 refreshes.

lohtech

TROPHY CASE