Every engineer starts as a kid who took something apart
Long before test rigs and production lines, I was a diploma student at Universiti Malaysia Pahang, part of a small team building a can compactor that also dispensed candy. It sounds silly written down, but it taught me something I still believe: the best engineering makes someone smile while it quietly solves a real problem.
That habit followed me everywhere. A magnetic levitation rig held up by nothing but carefully-tuned magnetic coils. A three-phase motor drive I got to present at a conference in Sarawak, which is still one of my proudest memories. A sine wave inverter I nudged, patiently and a little stubbornly, from 70% efficiency to 80%. None of it was glamorous work. Most of it was just sitting with a problem until it made sense — and then trying to explain it so it made sense to someone else too.
By the time I finished my Master's thesis, I'd noticed something about myself: the most satisfying part of any project was never really the finished circuit. It was the moment someone else understood it well enough to go build the next one on their own.