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30 June 2023, 8:07 PM

As the time flies, my semester 2 in chemical engineering is already finished. In this last semester for Year 1, I had learnt many courses including the Mass Balance SETK 1123. I very happy to met a good and kind lecturer and my fellow friends in section 3. The main topic that we had learnt in this semester are introduction to chemical processes, process and process variables, fundamentals of material balances in single unit and multiple units processes, material balances on reactive processes, single phase systems and multi-phase systems.

I did learn a lot throughout the mass balance course of the entire semester. I believe this course had taught me the fundamentals of the process design, which I would study in my third or fourth year, after attending all of the classes of Dr. Azizul. I believe it helping me understand the calculation behind chemical reactions. As a result, I will be able to apply the theory of conservation to solve the challenge of mass balance problem for my future job.

Additionally, I am an introverted and shy person so I was afraid to ask questions when I didn't understand the chapter's main idea. This is due to my fear of receiving a lecture from Dr. Azizul about why I didn't pay attention in class and made a very simple mistakes that others won’t do it. Dr. Azizul says that it's okay to make mistakes in university as long as you learn from them. Dr. Azizul will organize a simple discussion so that I can ask my teammates on how to solve the problem and me and my teammates will try to ask Dr. Azizul for the solutions of the question that cannot be solve together.

Furthermore, I still remember about the quiz 9 I attended in this course. Because me and my teammate done the quiz earlier so that we discuss about the assignment that we about to submit that day. That time I didn’t realise that cannot discuss without the permission of lecturer within the time of quiz so our paper is rejected. Thus, I know that although we didn’t discuss about the quiz but we already break the rules of quiz so that any of the reasons are cannot be accepted. I had learnt a lesson from this that we should always be attach utmost significance for every quiz and test to shows respects and also be in mind that follow the rules are important in our future life and not only for the test. I am glad I experienced this in my university life because it is okay to make mistake here but not in the future job.

Additionally, Dr. Azizul always assigned me homework and exercises to complete before the test. I think he just want me to study hard for the upcoming exam. I completed many of the tasks provided and I discovered that the exam questions are similar with the assignment and exercises that we have already done. I am aware that although if Dr. Azizul always wants to assist me in doing well on tests, he won't immediately provide the solution. He wants me to figure out the solution on my own so that I can learn from them. I think that I keep do the careless mistakes on exam such as forget to write basis, didn’t box the answers and this makes me lose many marks on it. However, I can avoid making some mistakes in my upcoming test by practise makes perfect from this experience.

In addition, I finished this semester's team mini-project for this course.  In order to complete this mini project, I had to work with a team to solve the complex mass balance problems for production of 200,000 MTA of glycidol from epoxidation of allyl alcohol process. For this project, there were numerous tasks that needed to be completed, such as creating an overall process flow diagram also for each equipment then we need to perform the mass balance calculation to obtain the answers. Since we had a lot of work to do, I assigned tasks to each teammate equally and encouraged them to use our WhatsApp group to ask for help if they came into any problems. I realise that this project will allow me to improve my soft skills, such as leadership, teamwork, and communication. This is so that the project can stimulate an issue in the actual world. When I apply for a job after graduating, I can demonstrate to the employer that I have expertise with this project because I can use this project as proof to demonstrate both my ability to solve complicated problems and my soft talents. This makes my chances of applying a job have increased.

On the day of the presentation, I experienced anxiety because I was afraid of making mistakes in my presentation. We forget to set the timer for our previous group presentation so that we just have 10 minutes for presentation. This make us more nervous because the original time for 15 minutes are very pack for us but now is shorten to 10 minutes. However, we need to accept the mistakes that we already made so that we need to be calm and use short and nice sentence to finish our presentation. Although time is not enough, but we still managed to finish our presentation. For the Q&A part, there are one group that asking why we need to use liquid-liquid extraction instead of distillation column. I don’t know the answers but hopefully one of our teammates know the answers and I learn from that. Dr. Azizul commented that presentation don’t need to talk about the decimal points for each calculation as in reality will have range of answers so we just need to know the approximate answers only.

In conclusion, I believe that the mass balance course which covers many fundamental engineering calculations and principles is one of the important subjects in chemical engineering. I wish I could always remember the things I learned from this experience and use them in my future job. Last but not least, I would want to express my profound gratitude to Dr. Azizul for teaching me not only the skills necessary to solve mass balance problems but also the important attributes I should possess in order to succeed as a professional chemical engineer.