GEM1514

Here I will be ranting about the GEM that I took up in my first semester here. It was actually one of the most difficult one and the one that was least popular. But blame the missed CORS bidding rounds, I had to take this one up to complete my 20MCs for 1st sem.
GEK1514 : Microelectronics, from Sand to IC, A general module offered (no longer) by the Faculty of Engineering talks about the manufacturing process of the Integrated Circuits and Micro controllers (sounds geeky ah..). With only 29 people in the whole of NUS taking this module, I guess it is the least popular one. The name itself carries a heavy weight with it (which soon got tied to our necks).
But I particularly found this module interesting. I like electronics stuff and have played around with microcontrollers, so with this module I got to know about its manufacturing process. To tell you truly, this was the only module for which I went for all lectures! and I mean ALL!
3 people from my CEG had taken this module including Geetika and Akash Ranka. It was fun to attend the lecture and tutorial for this module (both of which took place in the tutorial room E1-06-06). The lecturer was also a nice one: Prof. Chor. She was damn passionate about her electronics stuff and her lectures were really interesting as she brought along many samples to show around in the class.
The real fun in lectures was when Akash answered all the questions when everybody was half dozing and then the long discussion began with the Prof on some topic regarding that. The module also got interesting as we had a lab visit to a microelectronic manufacturing lab: the clean room. The lab visit was the best part of the module. Wearing the funny bunny suits and all protective coverings, working in a "clean" room was fun. The lab co-ordinator Ms. Sweta Agarwal showed us around the various aspects of the manufacturing process.
The Continous assessment for this module was small quizzes after every chapter got over. They were easy and were often points of hot debates in the class. (refer: Akash Ranka).
The lab report was followed by a project submission. I had a project group with Geetika and we made the project on the Societal Impacts of the IC industry: Health and Pollution hazards. The project was fun, and required many SoC nights. A 20 page project was finally submitted after sitting over it for a month.
The project was followed by a 15 min presentation on the project matter: 5 min for me, 5 min for Geetika and 5 min for cross-questioning. It was my first university presentation and we made sure it was a good one. We used pptPlex for the presentation design which turned out to be an eye-catcher. And controlling the presentation wirelessly using MobileWitch from Geetika's cell was fun too!
So in all I feel it was rather a good choice to take this module, in comparison to the other available ones. Moreover this was totally related to my field of education. The module also helped me in learning how to write a full-fledged project and a presentation.
Hoping to take more awesome ones like these later.

Fingers crossed for a good grade!