At present I shall be somewhere in the east of Europe probably getting to a stage where I'm ready to go back home to fresh clothes, linen and food! Since I took leave of my internship I have had to prepare myself for the interview I will attend when I get back in September. This will ultimately decide whether I am worthy of being an employee of the company when I graduate.
When one goes for an interview with an engineering corporation there are many yardsticks on which one is assessed. The first stage will be to gauge how competent you are as a process engineer: questioning will be based around a problem solving exercise with which you have to apply the first principle knowledge you have attained.
The other half of the assessment will involve determining how well you have performed against key performance indicators. The things to think about for these sort of activities are times when you have showed competency in influencing people to your way of thinking, team working abilities, drive and commercial sense.
With all these things in mind, if you ever find yourself going for a process engineering job then it is worth compiling a comprehensive list of evidence for times when you have demonstrated these type of competencies. If you do this and know your technical stuff then you should be sorted!
At this time I will be somewhere in the middle of Norway lapping up the Scandanavian sun and landscapes. This month long holiday could not have come at a better time.
You may remember from my last entry that work was getting to me(!) The deadline had been brought forward, there was lots of panic over getting the models to converge and run: chemical engineering was the last thing I wanted to think about!
The time has arrived, however, that I can kick back and relax. 4 weeks without non-Newtonian flow, advanced thermodynamics, and all the other transport phenomena. So, over the next few postings I plan to talk to you about the issues of a chemical engineering student, i.e. the cost of beer in foreign countries. At least this will prepare me for going back to uni at the end of summer!
So enjoy the weather and holidays, if you are going away, and keep reading.......
