Preparation
Started preparing for the certification on the 2nd week of January and took the exam on 1st February. Went through a ~14 hour long udemy course, alongside with the 6 additional practice exam. Result: 820 (82%)
Thoughts
Udemy Course review
The Udemy course by Stephane Maarek covered a wide variety of AWS services and contain quite a large amount of details. The content of the course goes beyond the certification and it serves as a very good introduction to AWS services. On the same note, a good portion of the content/details are not necessarily useful for the exam.
Certification review
As a foundational certification, I feel that the difficulty of the exam is quite well-managed. While there are a large number of services to understand, there are no concepts that are particularly difficult to understand. The difficulty of the exams lies more in the sheer amount of content (Services), rather than the depth of it.
Exam Format
The exam contains 2 types of questions, multiple choice and multiple response. An interesting aspect of the exam is that although the exam includes 65 questions. Only 50 questions will affect the score. As per the exam guide, the allocation between each section is shown in the table below
| Domain | % of exam |
|---|---|
| Cloud Concepts | 26 |
| Security and Compliance | 25 |
| Technology | 33 |
| Billing and Pricing | 16 |
Cloud Concepts
Security and Compliance
Technology
Billing and Pricing
Resources:
Official AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Page AWS Exam guide Udemy course by Stephane Maarek Additional practice exam by Stephane Maarek
Exchange!!! Consolidated some information which might be useful for those going to hanyang for exchange in the future.
Housing
To understand more about housing in Korea, this article provides good information on the different types of housings in Korea. We opted for housing outside as dormitory are not guaranteed. I found the housings for those of us going to hanyang from this site called goshipages. We will be staying at a place called cozytel near hanyang.
Visa Application
Courses (Hanyang)
You can find information about the courses in Hanyang here. You can search for more details about those courses here. A recommended course to take is Introductory to Korean as a HASS.
For ISTD-related courses, courses we took
| Track | Hanyang | SUTD |
|---|---|---|
| Computer Engineering | ENE4019 Computer Networks | 50.012 Networks |
| Artificial Intelligence | ITE3051 Artificial Intelligence and Application | 50.021 Artificial Intelligence |
| Financial Technology | ITE3016 Database System | 50.043 Database and Big Data |
| Financial Technology | BUS3002 Financial Management | 40.240 Investment Science (ESD) |
Although there is a machine learning theory in the pre-approved course list, it’s most likely not offered any more. Therefore, we will most likely have to take Statistical ML from ESD in Term 7.
Vaccination
Not going recommend what vaccinations to take as it is better to do your own research. However, for Singaporeans, you can check childhood vaccination here and here (NS).
During Summer 2019, I embarked on a 16-week internship at Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) as a Junior Research Assistant. I developed an eclipse plug-in for XSTAMPP which implements the STLSA process. XSTAMPP (eXtensible STAMP Platform) is an open-source platform for safety engineering. STLSA Process is a safety engineering model.
Cyber Defender Discovery Camp (CDDC) is a Cyber Security Event organised by the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA).
About the event
The programme started with a 3 weeks online training on immersive labs followed by an online qualifier for the finals.
The Digital Predix Hackathon was held from July 2018 until 20th Sep 2018. Together with Jin Kind and Ryan, we joined the hackathon as Ventus and came out as the winner in the renewable catagory.
About the hackathon
In the first month, we went through the Predix Developer Boot Camp to learn about the predix platform. After the training, we were given a month to work on an application using the microservices on the predix platform. Using relevant data, we used analytics services to come up with a prediction model that is displayed on a predix UI that is created. Github Repo
Learning Experience
Through the hackathon, I got to learn more about industrial IoT and renewables from experts in those fields. Through the app development using the platform, I learnt about things such as APIs (using postman), microservices and predictive analytics.
Ryan, myself & Jin Kind
Special thanks to Harsh & Jessie from GE for being very helpful throughout the entire hackathon
Digital predix hackathon is co-organized by GE(General Electric) & Focustech ventures.