Tell us about your study abroad program (the theme) and the country.

My summer program is titled “SERIUS” which stands for Summer Engineering Research Internship for U.S. Students. As the name suggests, the theme of the program is engineering: everyone participating in the program is enrolled in an engineering program, and their projects all center around one form of engineering or another. In particular, I am working on an electric and computer engineering project titled “Decoding the Brain” which has focused primarily on computational neuroscience. All of my work is coding based, with extensive use of algorithms.

I like that the other participants in this program are engineers, but from different disciplines and schools so I can experience a good deal of diversity. Even though the participants in the program are all studying at U.S. institutions, many of them have come from international backgrounds, which some stated as their reason for wanting to research abroad.

The country is the lovely Singapore! Located all the way across the world (12 hr time difference), Singapore is sometimes referred to as the “little red dot” because of its small size. Singapore is an island just off the southern tip of Malaysia, with half the surface area of Los Angeles, but with the third highest population density in the world to make up for it. Contrary to what some friends and relatives were led to believe, Singapore is not a third world country by any means, and it is considered one of the Four Asian Tigers (along with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan).