Assalamulaikum,
Life as a working person is no longer the same as a student. There are certainly no homework and lectures to go. But there are subtle differences in term of the hours that we spend each day at home and at work, our interaction with our coworkers, how to be a proactive and the most importantly on how to meet or exceed the expectation of our employer. That should be enough for the introduction of this post...
Right now, I have been working for about 3 months at Holcim Canada as a Supply Chain Analyst intern and about another 12 months to go before I start my 4th and hopefully my year at UofT. It may be weird to some of you about a year internship program that I undergo at the moment. At UofT, we call it as a Professional Experience Year (PEY) but at other universities, it is usually called as a coop program. If you think about it, you might think that this program is just a waste of time because you have to graduate a year later. But for me, the experience to work in Canada prior to graduation is a valuable experience for the future. A year is an ideal period of time for a company to train a student in their respective fields compared to 4 months summer vacations. And the most importantly is that you will have a better cv prior to graduation and have the higher chances to be called back by the company that you have worked before. I don't want to go on and on telling about the benefits of doing pey or coop's program.
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| View from my office |
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| Welcome to my office..haha |
Above are some pictures that I have taken from my office. A bit introduction about Holcim Canada, it is one of the biggest building materials and construction companies in Canada. It has several divisions such as aggregates, cements, concretes and constructions. For me, I am working under Dufferin Aggregates. Even though my nature of work is 90 percent office based, I have visited a couple of quarries and pits before. So, I know a little about how the quarries are operated and how the rock blasting is done and some other stuffs haha... but not that much..
As a Logistics or Supply Chain Analyst (I don't really know which one is my real position name actually).. I work cross functionally to improvise, maintain and troubleshoot the current logistics and supply chain operations. It involves developing new tools and improvise current tools such as shipment analysis, order management tool, incident management tool, inventory, daily and weekly vendors reports and so on and so forth. Also, I will help my manager to analyze the logistics performance and make decisions based on the tools that we have.. It really requires a lot of analytical, problem solving and programming skills, especially in excel vba... It is a great job, considering that you will have to do a lot of different things every single day and it is always all about problem solving and process improvement.. As a chemical engineering student, all of the things that I have said earlier did not not really seem like a chemical engineer job, isn't it.. But for me, to gain this kind of experience in such as big and reputable company is much more valuable. Maybe after grad, I will work more in the production side in the cement or concrete plants. Who knows? But after all, engineering job is all about problem solving and how to make things work better.. I hope that I can continue my job at my highest performance for these 12 months period...
That's all for now..Till next post
