Lijin Chin

Why did you choose Cranfield?

My name is Lijin Chin, I've graduated from the Economics for Natural Resource and Environmental Management course and I'm currently in a consultancy working as a consultant. I'm currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I'm in a very small firm of about 5 to 10 people and about 60% of our projects are with governments and another 40% with NGOs and other organisations like World Bank. We look into development issues as well as provide economics consultancy and social research consultancy to them, in order to help improve our development in that region.

My course actually is more of an addition to my technical skills in the job. I've been applying it through projects directly. In Malaysia, at the moment, environmental valuation is a subject area that hasn't been fully developed, but we can start seeing that there is a significant amount of growth that's happening in that sector, so by applying what I've learnt at Cranfield and using econometrics I’ve applied here in Cranfield I’m starting to see that it's going to bring us a lot more projects for the company, that is going to be good for the country.

The Chevening scholarship is provided by the Foreign Commonwealth Office and I came to know about it through one of my colleagues at work. She knew I wanted to do a master’s, at that point I hadn’t actually decided on Cranfield yet, but I was quite sure of the broad area that I wanted to study in and when keyed in the topic of interest, Cranfield popped up as the first choice. Once I read the course details and looked into the staff and where it was located I just decided that Cranfield was the one.

The scholarship made it completely possible because if I did not get it I wouldn't have come at all, so the support that I've gotten from the former foreign commonwealth office is very good, it's very inspiring to feel that even though I've been working a few years that someone keen to sponsor me to develop further so we managed to meet the officer when he came up to Cranfield and that was really good, we've also managed to meet the pro-vice-chancellor here through the scholarship programme.  I think for people who are wondering whether or not there's any worth in trying - it's definitely worthwhile. The processes can be long and although Cranfield was very immediate in giving me an offer I think it's a good chance to just give it a try.

What was Cranfield's impact

I think the discussions that we had with the people in Cranfield was the best bit. It comes very marginally to walking around! I really like the woodlands just behind the village. I find that because there is so much space and time in Cranfield we can have a lot of honest discussions over lunches, dinners, tea - and the intellectual strength of those discussions is not lacking at all. I mean it's very engaging, so many topics that I have never experienced before and true public lectures or just simple discussions with lecturers I find myself constantly being stimulated and that's very fulfilling intellectually.

Our class was quite small, l which was very good because got to know them very well. Students came from India, Ghana, Italy, Greece and two from Germany and myself from Malaysia - so it's a very good mix of developed and developing countries, Asian and Western cultures. It was quite interesting that, although it was an economics course, we had people coming from the engineering backgrounds, I'm from science background, ecology, and I think the fact that Cranfield has enabled us to have a very good discussion, despite coming from very different backgrounds is very interesting part of it.