Choice Of Career In Electrical And Electronics Engineering

One of my favorite questions to ask someone during a casual conversation usually elicits a puzzled look: how would you feel if cars started talking to each other? I vividly remember the time when I was asked to write a retrospective essay in my first semester at BRAC University on why I chose to become an electrical engineer. This should have been one of the easiest of topics for me to write about, but bewilderingly it became the most difficult one. I always knew I wanted to become an engineer as physics and mathematics were the closest to my heart and watching reviews of tech products was my number one hobby. But I asked myself, what do I have to offer to this field?

How am I going to contribute to the betterment of our lives? The motivation finally came to me two years later when I was travelling with my team-mates to a local stadium to play a match for my university soccer team. It was plain sailing until our team bus got stuck in traffic in the middle of a flyover. The bus stood still for four hours and thus we missed the match. Hundreds of vehicles lined up behind us. We sat there nervously on the bus not knowing anything about what ensued this massive gridlock. I later found out that there was an accident that occurred at the foot of the flyover. I thought to myself, if only the other cars near the place where the accident took place could notify the other vehicles approaching the flyover of the accident, these vehicles could take alternative routes and this hellish gridlock would never have befallen.

I immediately started researching on vehicular communication technologies, read a lot of papers and finally stumbled upon VANET (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network), an exclusive network designed to establish vehicular communication based co-operative systems. All of my projects and my thesis that followed this event was a derivative of VANET. I enrolled at BRAC University to pursue a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, where I felt that I could unleash the engineer inside me on my broader and more pertinent interests in electronics, communication and applied physics. In my early days as an undergraduate student, I became a member of Robotics Club of BRAC University and got involved in several small scale micro-controller based projects such as Line follower Robots, Grid Solver Robots etc. which culminated in my first noteworthy project “IOT Based Remote Access Fire Detection and Alarm System”.

For my microcontroller class project, I completed a Proteus simulation based project titled “Development of a Phase Unbalance Detection System For 3-Phase Supply”, for which I won the first prize. By the turn of the year, I joined the project management team of “BRAC Onnesha”, the first nanosatellite built in Bangladesh to be launched into space. From my third year on, I placed my unabridged focus on the traffic system of Bangladesh. I studied traffic systems of USA, Japan, Germany and England, ITS (Intelligent Transport System) standardization in these countries and several VANET applications pertaining to traffic forecasting, driver and passenger safety, collision avoidance, cruise control, driver assistance systems etc. Due to unavailability of ITS standardization and frequency band allocation for VANET applications in Bangladesh, I resorted to microcontroller based projects and software simulation to emulate my ideas. My digital system design class group project “Emergency Auto-Parking and Collision Avoidance System for Drivers” using ZigBee as the connection platform for Raspberry Pi ran vehicles was my first stride in this direction. In my undergraduate thesis titled “Implementation of Dynamic Vehicular Rerouting, Vehicular Safety and Pollution Reduction Techniques Using VANET”, I proposed three rerouting solutions to address three different scenarios and ran a simulation using OMNET++, SUMO and Veins to analyze the results. I’m currently working on developing an algorithm by incorporating all three of these solutions and considering more traffic variables. I’m also working on two more projects: ‘Smart helmet design for motorbike riders for physical ailment detection and emergency management’ and ‘Rating of roads and streets using vehicular OBU sensors and gyroscope’.

During my four years as an undergraduate student, I tried hard not to confine myself within the electronic devices only as I believed versatility should be the sharpest arrow in my quiver. I worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant for four semesters for two different courses: ‘Signals and Systems’ and ‘Digital Signal Processing’. I also worked as a volunteer for a departmental assessment report conducted by Institutional Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC). In 2016, I participated in HULT Prize at BRAC University and finished as a runner-up. Furthermore, I was a senior executive at Football Club of BRAC University and also played for the university football team. In spite of my involvement in numerous extra-curricular activities, I made sure that I do not stray away from my duties as a student as I maintained a strong academic record all throughout my university life. As a token of appreciation, I was awarded performance based scholarship for seven straight semesters. I also made it to the VC’s List and Dean’s list for two and four semesters respectively.