Chia Lih Wei (Class of 2018)

The past few years as an undergraduate has been a whirlpool of interesting experiences and unexpected access to many behind-the-scenes places in the electronics and space industry. What started out as joining two programmes related to fields I’m interested in: iDP Nanosatellite Programme (space) and NUS Overseas Colleges (entrepreneurship), led me down the rabbit hole of being part of a satellite launch (NUS Galassia) and starting my own company (TinyMOS).

The adventure started with launching our own “balloon satellite”, a simple satellite that does not launch into space but is instead tethered to a balloon and flown into the sky… and eventually led to building our own satellite radio ground station and the launch of our own nanosatellite into space in 2015.

Along the way I also got to meet many people in the space industry, including NASA astronaut James H. Newman.

The NOC programme then gave me the opportunity to spend a year in Silicon Valley working out of a garage start-up and designing a product from scratch, while taking classes and receiving tutelage from business veterans at Stanford University.

Back home, with the knowledge gained from the nanosatellite and NOC programmes, I started a camera company, TinyMOS, with my friends. This brought me to many places, learning and applying what I’ve learnt to manufacturing and selling products en-masse.

While working on TinyMOS, I’ve been to over 5 different countries to supervise the manufacturing of various components of our product, spent time in odd-looking testing facilities, and even set up our own manufacturing line for the assembly and programming of our product.

The cherry on top of this multi-year ongoing adventure? My most memorable experiences: spending two nights out in a desert, with a prototype of our product, doing testing under the moonlit sky; and witnessing a SpaceX rocket launch with the SpaceX team near the launch site.

It has definitely been a very fruitful undergraduate life. Being exposed to these different real-world industrial environments and experiences has not only made me a better engineer but it also enriched my life; definitely something I highly recommend all undergraduates to strive experiencing for themselves.