Category: NUS Chemical Engineering

What is ChE?

The four-year B.Eng. (Chemical Engineering) programme at NUS educates budding engineers to design, develop, and operate chemical processes by which chemicals, petroleum products, food, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods can be produced economically and safely with minimal environmental impact. In addition, Chemical Engineering students acquire the necessary background and skills to design and develop functional products that benefit society in many ways. Chemical processes involve reactions, heat transfer, separations and biological phenomena to produce useful and valuable products. Accordingly, they study changes in the composition, energy content and/or state of aggregation of materials taking into consideration the nature of matter and its properties (chemistry), the forces that act on matter (physics), similar aspects of biological materials (biology), and the relationships between them (mathematics). Chemical engineering differs from chemistry and applied chemistry programmes, with its emphasis on industrial applications of chemical reactions, separations and techniques for designing and operating economical, safe and environmentally benign processes.

Career Prospects

Chemical engineers are critical to the development of new technologies in robust and vibrant chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Significant growths are set for these industries both at home and abroad. Our graduates have found employment in chemical, petroleum refining, petrochemical, semiconductor/electronic, bio/pharmaceutical and related industries.

Major employers of chemical engineering graduates include ExxonMobil, Shell Eastern Petroleum, TECH Semiconductor, JGC, SOXAL, GSK, Merck, Sharp & Dohme, Sulzer Chemtech and many more. Thus, prospects for chemical engineering graduates are bright and exciting. Owing to its strong analytical content and many opportunities available, chemical engineering programme also enables graduates to explore a variety of non-engineering career options.

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Learning objectives: This module will introduce the principles of formulation, manufacturing technology and product quality assurance of a range of commonly used pharmaceutical dosage forms. Students will learn a body of technical knowledge and acquire practical skills in the manufacture and product quality evaluation of solutions, emulsions, suspensions, ointments, gels, suppositories, sterile products, microcapsules, capsules, tablets, inhalation products, powders and controlled-release products. Target students: Candidates without a Bachelor degree in Pharmacy will have to read this module as a Bridging Module.

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This is a foundation module for the development of Pharmacy Professional Skills. An overview of the pharmacy profession, the concept of pharmaceutical care, the healthcare system and the pharmaceutical industry in Singapore will be provided. Skills that students are expected to acquire at the end of the module include basic pharmaceutical compounding skills as well as pharmaceutical calculations for the preparation of different dosage forms encountered in pharmacy practice. This module has a strong emphasis on e-learning.

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This module is aimed to provide fundamental biochemistry knowledge which is important and relevant for pharmacy students to relate the knowledge to drug discovery and development. The module will emphasise the relevance and application of biochemistry in pharmaceutical and pharmacy practices.

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This module studies the fundamental physical & chemical principles that are important to the design and development of drugs. The major topics to be covered include: molecular properties, intermolecular forces, acidity & basicity, stereochemistry, tautomerism, mechanisms of action, biotransformation and some basics on UV-vis and IR.

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This module unfortunately has A LOT of memory work. You will about the basic foundations and structures, before applications to different materials. The chapters can be quite dry and even extremely difficult when you reach the end about phase diagrams or alloys. Certain parts required me to google or read the textbook to understand them.

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The class consisted of 2 lectures a week, and that’s it. All the lectures are webcasted, and the number of students attending the live lectures decreased steadily after the first lecture.

I was not expecting this module to be very difficult as I had some bio background from poly. After taking it, most of the content were already covered in poly, and here they were covered in even less detail. There was no need to memorise almost anything, because Dr Lin believes that understanding is more important, and he only tests on key concepts. In the tests, probably about less than 10% was content that had to be memorised.

But one thing I didn’t quite like was that Dr Lin pretty much read off the slides (including images), which made the lectures pretty dull and boring. From my understanding, he took over the module (and slides and notes) from a previous lecturer, so he might be still getting used to teaching this content. But the style of teaching can really drive some people away from life science / biology / biochemistry.

The module breakdown consisted of a 10% quiz 1 (in-class game format), 30% CA1 (short answer qn), 10% quiz 2 (LumiNUSquiz), 10% quiz 3 (LumiNUS quiz), 40% CA2 (40 MCQ). The quizzes were all shifted online due to COVID.

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The first half of the chapters was taught by Prof Seow and every lecture had a pop quiz (full marks worth 1% awarded as long as you submitted something). The second half of the modules was taught by Prof Jaafar and there were no pop quizzes in her lectures (resulting in a massive drop in attendance), with the exception being her final lecture where she presented us with a surprise pop quiz worth 2% of our final grade. Unfortunately for me, I was not present at the final lecture and subsequently lost that 2%.

I took LSM1301 to fulfill my science module requirement as a computer science student, with my only bio background being from sec 2 biology classes (no O level or A level bio). That being said, I was definitely at a disadvantage as most other students were Life Science majors or had taken O level bio/A levels H1 bio.

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This module is a core module for Chemical Engineers. This means that the cohort is small (~240) and it is not easy to score well though content and knowledge is very manageable. The first half of the semester is lectured by Dr Steven Halim and the second half by Dr Saif Khan. Both of them are very good lecturers and you will not find their lectures boring. Through the semester, you will learn basic coding with matlab and some matlab default functions (ode45, fminsearch, fmincon, et. cetera.). Module is generally manageable and fun if you have a taste for logical thinking.

Exam Format: 30% goes to weekly labs, 30% goes to mid-terms and 40% goes to the finals. Mid-terms and finals contain MCQs, short-answer questions and essays.

Comments: The mid-terms can be quite daunting as it is entirely set by Dr Steven who likes to challenge his students. Moreover, the MCQ portion carries a disproportionate weightage (10 MCQs account for 50% of the marks) in the paper and will cause potential slip-ups. If you are a below-average student, focus on MCQs and get them right – you will rejoice. If you are above-average, any carelessness will kill you. I lost 15 marks by getting 3 MCQs wrong due to carelessness. Labs are fun and pretty easy, listen to your TAs and start early.

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This module is one of the requirements for all engineering students. It is somewhat like a public speaking module, just that the themes of presentation are all engineering-centric. Classes are conducted seminar style, with 2 lectures of 2 hours weekly with a tutor.

The content of the module is split into two halves – the first, CE1, being a preparation for panel discussion on the issues engineers face in today’s society. The people who will be sitting together in the same panel as you would not be known until the day of the panel discussion, so as to prevent any premature discussion and coordination within classmates. The second, CE2, is a persuasive speech on an engineering product. This is done individually.

As a conclusion to the entire semester’s work, CE3, which is a graded reflection exercise, will be submitted for grading.

My personal experience with this module is that it isn’t too difficult to keep up with the stuff taught in class, being a communication module. Although this is a communication module, it doesn’t mean that the person who talks the most will score the most credit. This is true throughout all facets of the module, and what is more important is making an impression on the tutor / assessor without having to talk too much.

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