Ep. 16 - Engineering Differently: People, Data & Trust

Wow.

What a hard shift.

And I think you touched down on that because it's always the challenge, right? When you are gifted in school, you have all these options and perspective and your mind is just going left and right.

But then have your heart set on one field and you're just like, oh, here is where I want to be.

It's so amazing to hear you vocalize that.

So looking back, what was your biggest challenge in your first few years as an engineer?

I think understanding why we do engineering.

I keep going back to like that.

That was a big there was a big purpose question.

Yes.

Like what is all of this for? I think some some figure that out earlier than others.

So for me, there was a lot of that.

I was also in oil and gas camps in the middle of nowhere, which is not really fun when you're a 20 year old and you open up Instagram and all of your friends are having a good time, whereas you're five hours away from the city.

so there was a lot of that but then equally the other big thing was there was this shock as a graduate I think you you you do this degree you think you're capable and then you graduate and you start working and people are asking you to fill in excel sheets and do a lot of admin and you're not really actively thinking and you're not doing any of the things that you thought you were going to be doing so i spent a lot of my time for the first two years just doing a lot of admin, I would say.

And I was just like, I thought we were doing engineering.

No, we were clerks.

And that was one of the biggest things.

And I mean, I've gone on like mortals a lot about actually removing a lot of bad admins.

So I really took it to heart.

But it wasn't just me.

I was on an airport project in Abu Dhabi.

and they had five of us who were graduates who joined the project controls functions all had really good grades and like were getting paid decently and all of that and every single one of us was just taking these six cells filling them out sending them out to subcontractors and asking them to fill out certain things having to then spend a lot of time aggregate that information create reports I was just like, surely we can be doing something more interesting than that with the knowledge that we had.

So there were two things going on in my mind.

First, what is this sector for and why am I sitting in these weird locations? And then the second was why am I doing all of these, like, really boring administrative jobs? And surely I can be doing something more interesting that feels like it actually contributes to the project.

So those were, I would say, my two big ones.