Friday January 8, 2016 was my last day as a working employee at Ove Arup and Partners HK Ltd. This was my first full time big boy job. It was my first job where I went to client meetings, where I went to multiple offices in different cities, where I got a business card. And it's the first time I've ever resigned, which was a surprisingly difficult process to complete. When I look back on my projects, I do find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. In the environment of a major international engineering juggernaut, I managed to work on the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, the conceptual planning for the Hong Kong Airport 3rd Runway Expansion, building physics analysis on Icon Siam (luxury mall in Bangkok), and doing stats and regressions for the HKGBC Benchmarking and Energy Saving Tool. While my role on these massive projects were relatively minor, those were four very cool projects with such large scope makes them interesting to talk about. Still, while this retrospection can conjure up feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment, most of my time at Arup was very difficult to endure.
Pretty quickly it was clear to me that this was not an ideal job for me. Obviously I had not studied engineering. This presented both a knowledge gap and a mindset disparity. Despite their left-brain link, a mathematician is more interested in the thought process and proof of a theorem, whereas an engineer is interested solely in the answer. To a humanities outsider, these differences may appear insignificant, but to me immersed in engineering territory, I felt radically different. In addition to what I lacked, whole skillsets I did possess were marginally used. My background is not just in mathematics and statistics - I graduated from a liberal arts university and took full advantage of its offerings. While I do not expect every little course I study to advance one's career, it pained me that my writing ability, interest in politics and policy, and travel experience were essentially irrelevant to my job performance. I barely even scratched the surface of all the statistical modeling I had studied.
Cultural barriers were ubiquitous throughout my time at Arup. The engineering/liberal arts difference is itself a cultural barrier, but my western education and upbringing often posed difficult for my local coworkers to reconcile.
I leave with a completely transformed mindset. Somewhere along the way I learned to be professional, responding to emails timely and treating clients and contractors with respect. I can see the way I used to write emails and handle simple affairs, and it's a world away from what I do now.
I've now left to embark on my own. I'll be able to accomplish a dream I've always had of doing work in a foreign coffee shop, starting in Vietnam, one of the best coffee nations this world offers. I have plenty of worries. I've always had ADD so focus has always been a problem. Even right now as I write this post, I am multi-tasking with an email announcing the HKUPA Annual General Meeting in draft and an MBA essay by Janice in track changes. I know I'll have to be extremely disciplined and set achievable goals along the way.
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| M+ Museum for Visual Culture |
Pretty quickly it was clear to me that this was not an ideal job for me. Obviously I had not studied engineering. This presented both a knowledge gap and a mindset disparity. Despite their left-brain link, a mathematician is more interested in the thought process and proof of a theorem, whereas an engineer is interested solely in the answer. To a humanities outsider, these differences may appear insignificant, but to me immersed in engineering territory, I felt radically different. In addition to what I lacked, whole skillsets I did possess were marginally used. My background is not just in mathematics and statistics - I graduated from a liberal arts university and took full advantage of its offerings. While I do not expect every little course I study to advance one's career, it pained me that my writing ability, interest in politics and policy, and travel experience were essentially irrelevant to my job performance. I barely even scratched the surface of all the statistical modeling I had studied.
Cultural barriers were ubiquitous throughout my time at Arup. The engineering/liberal arts difference is itself a cultural barrier, but my western education and upbringing often posed difficult for my local coworkers to reconcile.
I leave with a completely transformed mindset. Somewhere along the way I learned to be professional, responding to emails timely and treating clients and contractors with respect. I can see the way I used to write emails and handle simple affairs, and it's a world away from what I do now.
I've now left to embark on my own. I'll be able to accomplish a dream I've always had of doing work in a foreign coffee shop, starting in Vietnam, one of the best coffee nations this world offers. I have plenty of worries. I've always had ADD so focus has always been a problem. Even right now as I write this post, I am multi-tasking with an email announcing the HKUPA Annual General Meeting in draft and an MBA essay by Janice in track changes. I know I'll have to be extremely disciplined and set achievable goals along the way.
I had always wanted to create my own career path, and certainly studying statistics then working at an engineering company in a foreign country is an unusual path. I knew there was so much I needed to learn, and these past four years have not disappointed. But now it's time to take what I've learned and apply them in the direction I want to, and prove to myself that I am capable and can create something original.
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