What a Weekend !!! Part 2

On Saturday morning, we dropped by at UNITEN to attend the inaugural Power Engineering Student Competition organised by UNITEN. Being the current MNC-CIGRE Secretary and the fact that MNC-CIGRE is one of the major supporters of this event, I am obliged to see the progress of the competition which was conducted in quiz and simulation format. Seven local universities participated in this competition with each university sending two teams to compete.

Among other things, this event aims to generate interest among the students in the engineering programme in the local U's which over the years have seen dwindling numbers of student register for power engineering courses compared to the much prefered communication or electronic engineering programme.
In fact, the phenomena of undergraduate students more incline to take non-power engineering courses has risen to the alarming level worldwide. In the USA for instance, some universities have basically close-down or do not offer any more courses in the power engineering because of sheer lack of students. If goes unchecked and with no proper incentive given, this phenomena might spread to Malaysia and we will suffer the same fate similar to the more developed countries in getting the nation's cream of the cream to work in the power engineering sectors.

The real-man behind the scene is Dr Sallehudin Yusof from APS Sdn. Bhd. As the local SIEMEN-PTI agent, APS provided the organiser with PSSE Power System Engineeering software package as the tool to be used in the competition. Prior to this, APS conducted a One-Day workshop to the competiting students on how to use the software and also to familiarise them on the 'real-meaning' of power system engineering. The workshop had in fact provided a platform for the students to get the feel of how the competition will be carried out and this had actually helped them in the process.



The winner of this inaugural event is UKM'B', followed by UNITEN 'A' and 'B' in the second and third place respectively. MNC-CIGRE is proud to be part of this event and we hope that we can continue contributing to the success of this event in the coming years.