SUTD Workshop- Women in Technology and Design
Post written by Cheryn Ng (14S7H)
Date of event: 30 July 2014
All GATE students attended the Women in Technology and Design workshop by Singapore Univeristy of Technology and Design (SUTD) on 30th July 2014. Although it is entitled ‘women’, the workshop content was definitely applicable to both males and females. In the opening talk, various female faculty members introduced themselves and briefly shared their work experiences and jobs in SUTD with us, and the executive director of SUTD explained their various programmes and collaborations with institutions worldwide. Before the workshop, many wondered why they were signed up for it even though they were not interested in both engineering and design. However, we soon understood that SUTD’s education aims to be multi-disciplinary and liberal, which is very similar to GATE’s objective, thus other subjects like biology and economics were also incorporated into their academic programmes.
After the talk, the participants were split into various classrooms for the main item— a sit-in lesson, where we could experience the teaching and learning style in SUTD. Since SUTD’s main programme is designed 90% according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) programme, it was a really refreshing lesson design. A few lecturers would assist each other in conducting lessons in each class of 20-30 students, and self-directed and student-centric learning were highly encouraged. In the classroom I was in, various physical activities that were probably meant for beginners like us were conducted to help us understand the task requirements better. Spirited discussions were facilitated by the lecturers and current SUTD students to complete the task of designing an environmentally friendly product or system. We were given a lot of creative freedom and the facilitators only guided us when we were stuck.
It was a really enlightening experience, to see how SUTD runs its programmes in a manner very dissimilar from what we have experienced in our education system so far.
