I am a chemical engineer by profession. A fresh graduate and is currently
working (my first job) in a food manufacturing industry focusing on dried fruit
products. I was very excited at first to be in the real world of work where
applications of chemical engineering principles be seen in actual processing
plants. I was assigned as one of the quality assurance supervisors in the
production lines wherein my tasks include verification and monitoring of
process parameters conforming to the given processing specifications, sensory
evaluations of raw materials and finished products, production area sanitation
and personnel hygiene, and a whole lot of monitoring. It was fun, but as
days go by, I realized that I am more into handling people rather than applications
of the things I learned as a chemical engineer. It went boring and the tasks
begin to be repetitive. Though my decision-making skills were being sharpened,
my academic learnings begin to decline.
I guess this is
what they call practicality in the world of work. I always hear this while I
was still in my college days, “You won’t get to apply all the things
you learn here in school; only the very basics or none at all.” True
indeed. I went through five years of tough schooling which included deriving
formulas, proving equations, doing mass and energy balances, designing
equipment and processing plant, sleepless nights, copying of assignments, copy
and pasting from the internet and a lot more of what normal college students
do, and end up pointing your fingers to people at work to make a job done.
It was disappointing;
it was not what I expected to be. Or maybe I am just inside the wrong industry,
it made me think how amazing it would be to be in a engineering designing firm
wherein you get to calculate, estimate, design real equipment and utilities.
Then there will be where real chemical engineering applications will be. But,
then again, softwares do exists nowadays, and probably there will no longer be
calculations involved though I don’t really know. Anyway, that’s my next
target, to hopefully work in a designing firm. I can’t wait to test or review
our college “project design” whether it was really feasible. Below is process
flow of our project design, production of monosodium glutamate from cassava. It
looks really complicated and cool but I don’t know whether that can be really
done in actuality.
First Part of the Process Flow
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Anyway, I’m still working inside the
company; I plan working long term at least 2 years and learn what little I
can. Though they transferred me to the research and development department,
this time it’s a new environment and I’ll be blogging about it soon.
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