Page 51 - Scholarship Guide Aug 2020

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URA Scholarship
Chua Wei Cheng, Wilson

Age: 23
Now: Bachelor
of Engineering in
Computing, Year 2
Imperial College
London, UK

From: NUS High School

My group mates and I posing with the BrickPi rover that we built for a course project.

fi eld. With that, I am personally looking to ex- well-polished products. Driving a project and Speaking about school projects, at the Impe-
plore and expand my knowledge base. Being seeing it come to fruition smoothly does leave rial College London, my fi rst year programming
able to take on summer schools and external a great sense of satisfaction, after all. project theme was “making the world a bet-
internships at other fi rms during summer ter place.'' We built and programmed a rover
breaks is an aspect of the URA Scholarship that Work at URA is fulfi lling in many ways. As a that can be scheduled to move about and do
I fully appreciate. software engineer, I fi nd the work highly di- things, so we might have gone a little off-topic.
verse and dynamic. There are plenty of varied That however spurred me on to consider the
During last summer, I returned to Singapore spatial datasets, complex web applications, outcomes of what I will create.
to embark on a training attachment at URA. and intricate databases that all require highly
Many might wonder about what kinds of ICT diverse technical skill sets to wrangle with. As a future developer, I will be part of a team
work URA has to offer (I know this because I Software development at URA naturally re- that creates digital tools for planners, which
have been asked many times). URA’s Infor- quires a deeper level of understanding on how are used to gain deeper insights and make bet-
mation Systems and Geospatial Group spe- urban planners work, as close interactions with ter planning decisions for a more liveable envi-
cialises in bringing many of URA’s systems to end-users are necessary to continually improve ronment. Knowing that my work will be used
life. Some of these include public facing web projects. Compared to school projects where well by others is enough to spark joy in me.
applications such as URA SPACE, to internal you will be happy if you pass the automated
tools that empower our planners. Many of the code tests, now you are trying to make other Now then, what about you?
experienced system analysts at URA have deep people happy. Challenging, isn’t it?
knowledge and skill sets in different kinds of
software, providing me with many opportuni-
ties to learn from them. Springtime in Kew
Gardens, with my
The challenges that system analysts face in family.
URA are quite alike most typical large ICT busi-
nesses out there. It is diffi cult to develop appli-
cations that cater towards the user experience,
while maintaining large system architectures
that have to deal with issues such as scaling. As
a result, the technical experience gained while
working at URA is comprehensive and covers
a great number of subject matters (i.e. literally
the full stack).
In public service, developers can concentrate
on developing stable and meaningful systems,
and not worry about profi t margins. Indeed,
as an engineer, I would prefer to produce