Juan Manuel

Since I was a little child, my parents said it was very difficult to bear with me because I was constantly asking questions, such as: “Why does this thing happen?”, “How does this work?”, “What is the meaning of that?” and so on. I just felt sometimes it was difficult to just sit and see the world, I needed to explore, search for explanations instead of taking things for granted, disassembling gadgets to see the internal mechanisms and fix them myself in case they were broken, etc. Maybe I was just meant to be an engineer.

Even if I was and am still a bit of an introvert, I hated that part of myself and I knew I needed to change it. That’s why I studied my Chemical Engineering degree in a different city from my hometown (even if the easiest was to stay at my local university), and that’s why I came to Hong Kong, on the other side of the world, for my postgraduate studies.

I am loving Hong Kong more so than expected. I first came for a two-year MPhil, but eventually switched to PhD, my research being based in air purification, because as an engineer, not only does the production industry concern me, taking care of our environment is just as important.

Maybe the main reason I’m joining the Engineering Student Ambassador Program (apart from further meeting people from different cultural backgrounds with the engineering as a common matter) is my surprise when I realized that in Hong Kong (as sadly in other big cities around the world), engineers are not as “well accepted” by society as other disciplines such as business. I think a world with more engineers and less people caring just about money would be a better world, for all of us.