Life as an intern - Part 2

Assalamualaikum.

Last week, July 10 2012, marked the two months of my internship here in PPG Shah Alam. It is really hard to believe actually that I have past a couple of months here considering the hardship and challenge that I have to face throughout my time here. There was a time when I felt so distressed and almost giving up my job. But, the challenges that I faced here actually made me stronger and better. There were thousands of good and not so good experiences I gained here that I could use it to improve myself in the future.

In the previous post, I wrote about why I'm doing my internship here, so this post will be mainly about what is my everyday activities and daily routines at my workplace. For most of the time, I'll be working in the lab. I'm assisting QC technicians to perform several quality lab test on paints based on the given specs for each paints. I'm responsible to ensure the quality assurance of all finished paint products. Basically, there are several tests that I need to perform on particular paint before it can be sent to the customer. It includes, fineness or the appearance of a certain paint, viscosity, weigh percent of solid,  sagging properties and many more. If any of the paint's specs are out, for example the paint's viscosity is too low or even too high, I need to make some adjustment and calculation to solve the problem. It may sound boring to some of you but to be truth, it is not really related to my current study actually. Maybe there is a bit that touches my course but not that much. After all, this is my first official job I've ever done in my life and I need to be able to cope the situation well.

Also, I've been given a variety of assignments or projects to be done within a certain time frame, which is throughout my internship time of course. So far, I've been involved with a lot of lean manufacturing project, such as how I'm going to improve a certain process in the plant such as the paint production process or packing process. To do that, I need to do a lot of so called paper work to properly outline the steps that are going to be taken for each process and also the power point slide to present my project to my supervisor. Another thing that I forget to mention about this factory is that it is fully manual operated plant. At first I thought, all of the process here were going to be fully automation, since PPG is one of the well regarded paint manufacturing company in the world, but sadly to say, this company depends to much on foreign workers that do not really have much skills and determination plus the language barrier that make life much harder for the supervisor and management. 

Side note.. there is still one month left before leaving this company.

To be continued..