On Saturday, 18 October 2025, a cheerful cohort from the Mechanical Engineering Class of 1975 gathered at the home of their beloved former lecturer Professor Bong Tet Yin to celebrate two milestones: the 50th anniversary of their graduation and Prof Bong’s 88th birthday.
The reunion felt like a living laboratory—a blend of engineering education, camaraderie, and irresistible food. Alongside a birthday cake and a celebratory bottle of champagne, alumni tucked into a proudly local spread: Mao Shan Wang durian, Hakka “suan pan zi” (abacus seeds), ang ku kueh, popiah, and tau sar piah. The conversation flowed as freely as the laughter.
LESSONS THAT LASTED A LIFETIME
Half a century on, engineering education still animated the room. Many argued for deeper industry partnerships, recalling how transformative that exposure had been.
Two classmates vividly remembered a final-year project supervised by Prof Bong: they designed and built a testing rig to study the performance of air-conditioner cooling coils for ACMA, then a home-grown manufacturer. “It was real equipment, real data, real stakes,” one alumnus said. “That’s when theory met the factory floor.”
Another alumnus, who spent eight years with Brown & Root—then among the world’s largest engineering firms—credited his four-year training for the confidence to take on major projects from the outset. The discipline of engineering, he added, later underpinned his journey into successful entrepreneurship.
Several also highlighted Prof Bong’s forward-looking research in the 1970s on solar-powered air-conditioning—“a visionary line of inquiry that reads like today’s sustainability playbook,” one attendee noted.
A JOURNEY TO SINGAPORE
Between slices of cake and mouthfuls of durian, the group coaxed from Prof Bong the story of how he came to make Singapore home. An exceptional student in Bandung, Indonesia, he was sent to the United States for doctoral studies and completed his PhD in 1968. Returning to Indonesia at a turbulent moment of political transition, he found the promised university post no longer available.
After a brief stint in Malaysia, he crossed the Causeway to teach at Ngee Ann Technical College (today Ngee Ann Polytechnic), and later joined the University of Singapore. Along the way—thanks to the kind offices of colleague Dr Loo Ming and his wife, both educators—Prof Bong was introduced to a charming English literature teacher whose friendship would help anchor his life in Singapore.
MORE THAN NOSTALGIA
What lingered after the plates were cleared wasn’t just the fragrance of durian but the conviction that good engineering teaching changes lives. Prof Bong’s blend of rigour, relevance and curiosity set a standard that his former students still measure themselves against—on engineering fabrication sites, in design offices, in research labs, and in boardrooms.
As the afternoon wound down, someone raised a toast that neatly captured the mood: “To a class that still asks hard questions, and to a teacher who taught us how.”
