Life as a intern

Assalamulaikum,

Currently, I am doing my internship as a chemical engineering student at one of paint manufacturing companies in Shah Alam, PPG Performance Coatings. I bet many of you do not realize or know the presence of this company or even heard about this company before. But, this company is quite prestigious worldwide..haha.. The headquarters of this company is at Pittsburgh, USA and if you check the company's profile, it has a lot of manufacturing plants all over the globe covering North America, Europe, Asia and many more. Probably, other paint manufacturing company such as Jotun, Dulux and etc are well known to the public because their products are widely used to paint the house and building. But, the truth to be told, PPG products cover more than house or even the building, they provide the coating or paint for marine ship, coating for cars and many other industries.

So, back to life as an intern here. Most of my friends were quite surprised, why do you start your practical so early in the second year? and the second question was why do you do your internship here, not in Canada instead?... So, for most of the time, I have to explain  to them again and again about my internship here. To begin with, as an engineering students, we must equip ourselves with a lot of knowledge and information in real engineering life that cannot be found in the class. In class, for a chem eng students, we solved the differential equation, learn heat and mass transfer, process engineering and etc... But in the real life, there is more that, and that kind of knowledge can only be obtained through internship or working in a particular industry. I think the best way to gain knowledge is to not wasting my 4 months summer holiday with just sleeping and doing nothing at home instead, doing an internship at any company that can provide me with experience and condition of the real working life.

For the second question, why here in Malaysia, not in Canada, the place where you're studying right now. To be truth, I have applied for a lot of job post in Canada that is related to my field and among tens of applications, I received two interview invitation, one is ERCO WorldWide and the other is Atlantic inc.. Erco is the chemical manufacturing company and atlantic is basically a paper manufacturing company.. But, due to the higher competition here in Canada, I have failed to get the position in both company and the main reason is because my CV or resume is not really appealing to them as I have no experience and what I have in my resume is mostly my projects and other academic experience. So, I decided to do my internship in Canada next year after my third year, but first I need to find a valuable experience by finding a job here in Malaysia.. and after a lot of applications and emails, I got a place here in PPG Performance Coatings Shah Alam..

Even though, there is a lot more to tell about my job here, maybe I will wrap it up in the next post..

To be continued..