Straight to Barco
“I never imagined that a child raised in the countryside would have been able to work for Barco,” says Hu Song-tao, graduate from Group T and Beijing Jiaotong University. When he entered this firm after a thorough application procedure, he was only 22 years old. He thus became the company’s youngest R&D engineer, and also one of their few staff members recruited straight after graduation.
Producing results, not just knowledge
He vividly remembers his time at Group T, though. “The courses offered there are very practical and the exams mainly test a student’s ability to actually apply theory and produce results. Study of the VHDL hardware descriptive language, for example, did not focus on sorting and syntaxes, but rather it required writing a part of a program for displaying an image.” Hu Song-tao made an active triangle controlled by buttons. Though it looks simple, inside there is a complex system with multiple modules.
Inspiring experiments
He experienced that the approach at the university college is also a comprehensive one. “What Group T expects you to do is not necessarily to know a lot, but to know how to implement what you know yourself.” Details from experiments at the school stayed with Hu Song-tao up till this very day and to such an extent that they still inspire him when designing today.
The Chinese vs the Belgian system
“Everybody expects a decent evaluation, but what does evaluation actually mean? Differences in evaluation methods can only be perceived once you have experienced them. In China, theory is highly regarded as opposed to practice. At Group T, they don’t distinguish between the two. But the biggest difference between the Chinese and the Belgian system is probably the fact that in Belgium, you can choose your education at will.”
Writing his thesis at Group T obviously set Hu Song-tao to thinking.
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