Over summer I moved to Tauranga to work at Aurecon as an undergraduate process engineer. Aurecon is an engineering and infrastructure advisory company and is where I completed my sub-professional work experience hours. I wanted to do these remaining hours of work experience in a consultancy environment as I thought it was a possible career choice for me after university and I knew I could learn a lot.
Working at Aurecon has been a very beneficial experience as I got to work on a variety of projects, primarily for Fonterra, including many different tasks. These ranged from writing equipment schedules, developing calculation spreadsheets and writing a commissioning plan. These tasks all helped me to develop my knowledge and showed me what skills and technical information from university translate into consultancy. For example, there are some basic equations I studied at university which I used a lot including mass and energy balances and heat exchanger calculations. I also got to use the verified calculation spreadsheets which make calculations very fast and reliable. These spreadsheets serve as a good check for any calculations done by hand and would have been a great resource to have at university last year.
I worked in the Energy, Resources & Manufacturing team at Aurecon and worked closely with two senior process engineers in the office. This was a great experience as they always took the time to explain concepts and tasks to me and had a lot of knowledge to share. Over the summer period I got to work in the Hamilton and Wellington offices and collaborate over skype with engineers in Auckland and Christchurch. I also got to do a site visit to Ballance in Tauranga which was very educational as I could see how the diagrams detailing the process translated into real life. I am very grateful for the opportunity to work for Aurecon and feel as if it has set me up well for my future career.
