Conversation with Pak Sas

Our school director here is Pak Saswinadi Sasmojo. Prior to becoming director of Del Poly, he served as a professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Engineering Informatics of Institut Teknologi Bandung. I have worked with him since I was here from April 2004. This afternoon Pak Sas spent hours talking with me and I learn some important lessons from it. Some of them have been explained by him in previous other conversations or meetings.

• When conducting a research or anything with a research taste, all you have to do is to find the answer to these four questions:

1. What is the question you want to address?
2. Why do you need to address it?
3. What is the approach/strategy should be used to address it?
4. How to carry out the strategy?
   

• Do not immediately believe in a person who claims that he is highly experienced in doing something. You'd better give him some tests because his long experiences may be totally wrong.
• There are four main skills of engineering. They are:

1. How to ANALYSE a system?
2. How to OPERATE a system?
3. How to CONTROL a system?
4. How to DESIGN (SYNTHESIZE) a system?
   

• He gave me these simple complete definitions to some important engineering terms. They are actually written in Bahasa Indonesia in Chapter 2 from his book titled"Sains, Teknologi, Masyarakat & Pembangunan" published by ITB, 2004. Here are their free translation from me.
• PHENOMENON is something that we can see, sense and feel.
• STRUCTURES of a phenomenon are components that build the phenomenon and interdependence patterns which exist between them.
• SYSTEM is a phenomenon which all structures have been defined.
• SYSTEM ENVIRONMENT and SYSTEM BOUNDARY can be implicitly defined when a SYSTEM can be defined.
• FUNCTIONS of a system are abilities of the system that enable it (a) to do operations that make the system do its role in its environment and (b) to influence the development of its environment.
• ANALYSIS is a study of recognizing the structures of a phenomenon.
• MODEL is a description of structures of a phenomenon which can be stated in media that can be communicated e.g. iconic model, graphical model, computer model, tabular model and mathematical model.
• SIMULATION is the activity of recognizing the behaviors of a system by studying its model.
• SYNTHESIS is the process of manage the previously known structures to produce another structure/system/object that can perform particular targetedbehaviors or functions.
• DESIGN is the activity of creating a system in which the process of creating the system structures and how to form the structure are defined.
  
• You have to have good reasons in doing and not doing anything.
• A good lecturer or professor is like a mesin bubut, a machine that can produce itself.