Majoring in Electronic Engineering, I have taken many interesting courses but if I were to choose the most memorable course of all, it would be the engineering design class. During the course, I was required to learn Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (Lab View), a systems-design platform for visual programming language. But because students, including myself, were not familiar with the software, we had to put in a lot of effort and extra time to master the software program. Thanks to our professor, Chung Il-Yup, we learnt beyond our expectation on Lab View and finally got used to the program. The last assignment that Prof. Chung Il-Yup gave us was to participate in the 2013 Green Energy Competition organized by the Korean institute of Electrical Engineers. What Prof. Chung wanted us to do was work on an actual project using Lab View. Three teams out of nine in our class got accepted into the first round of the competition, and our team was one of them.

By using Lab View, our team tried to adjust the illumination system of street lights. When a vehicle approaches or moves towards the street light, the light becomes brighter but when a vehicle moves away from the light, it dims out. The problem was that the ultrasound sensor of the street light does still recognized the vehicle as approaching even though it was leaving the site (near the street light). Thus, to save electricity and protect citizens from possible crimes at night, we improved the design of street lamps by adding additional designs and programming codes. So when a vehicle is parked within a certain range of the street light for less than 3 minutes, the street lamp illuminates brightly and when it is parked for more than 3minutes, the street lamp goes to the minimum illumination state.

The Green Energy Competition was held 12 July 2013 at the Jeju international convention center. We were able to complete our project at 5am on the same day that the event was held. Thus, our schedule was really tight. We had to work under pressure to see that the finished product was safely delivered from the university to the event center in Jeju. On arrival at Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, our belongings had to pass through security check. They were specially censored at the airport security check point because we had many electrical and electronic devices. After several twists and turns, we successfully arrived at the Jeju international convention center and immediately got to work to set up the model in our booth for demonstration and evaluation.

The evaluation committee consisted of four members - two professors and two businessmen who were in charge of the evaluation and rating of all the contestant projects in the event hall. When the evaluation committee visited our booth, we had to describe how efficient our product was, the principle of operation and the socio-economic benefits. We had to present to the evaluation committee and other participants for roughly four hours. Based on our convincing explanation and description of our product, most of the participants from academia and industries at the event became highly interested in our product and were unstinting in their praise.

Through this experience, I realized how important my major is and this has further helped boost my self-esteem. Participating in this project was definitely a challenge for us but our effort paid off positively with our product claiming a gold award. Finally, I would like to thank my team members and also my girlfriend  who supported me tirelessly.