Ly Kheng Ing

When I was a kid, I was a smart little clown. I couldn't just sit still. I had to always chat to people and just liked to dress up, play games and visit friends. When I was in high school, I wasn't really too sure what I wanted to do when I finished. Some friends, from when I  was working in McDonald's, convinced me that commerce and economics and finance would be great because you learn how to make money.

Doing a semester of finance and commerce, I decided, "This isn't for me", and I didn't like reading text books after text books, and thought, "Let's go back to engineering". And that's what I did. I went back to engineering and chose civil and, yeah, now I'm a civil engineer. It turned out really well. I really, really enjoyed it and made heaps and heaps of friends.

I ended up in transport, transport engineering.  So it was looking at traffic lights and how to reduce congestion, how to improve safety on our roads. Civil engineers are really quite technical. They can be, but I'm not one of them. I like socialising and chatting and working with lots of people.

When I was a kid, I used to get told off lots for talking too much, but it's really worked to my advantage now,  because that's all - that's what it's all about in civil  engineering in project management: coordinating, working  together to finish a project and actually seeing it get built.