DIPLOMA IN ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING (S99, DEEE)

Gabriel Lee – Winner of Lee Kuan Yew Award, ST Engineering Land Systems Gold Medal, Institution of Engineers Gold Medal Award and OCBC Prize

At the age of nine, Gabriel already learnt how to dismantle faulty electrical appliances around the house after reading a children’s book on simple DC (direct current) circuits. Thus, it was a no-brainer for this highly motivated self-learner to decide to study electrical and electronic engineering at Singapore Polytechnic (SP).

Dismantling faulty electrical appliances at the tender age of nine was not the only unique thing about Gabriel. Unlike majority of children in Singapore, Gabriel was home-schooled for 12 years prior to entering SP. However, this did not hinder his passion for all things engineering-related. Instead, it shaped him into a self-directed learner and gave him free rein to tinker and tamper with light bulbs and batteries.

The Lee Kuan Yew Award winner also took part in the WorldSkills Singapore 2021 event and bagged the prestigious Gold Medal in the Industrial Control trade category. In recognition of his well-rounded achievements and contributions, Gabriel was also awarded the SP Excellence Award in 2022.

Apart from school work, Gabriel also volunteered for peer tutoring, where he helped his peers understand a challenging programming language so that they could apply the knowledge to code and debug their own projects.

The holistic achiever aspires to become a defence engineer at DSO National Laboratories or the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), working on cutting-edge technologies for national defence.