I love my job...but....

Hmm. Now it is 10.45 pm already. I don’t know what I’m going to do before I fall asleep. Actually, I am just thinking about my work here. I really love my job and definitely I do love chemical engineering. But till now, I have never put any particular specialization towards my career. Maybe it is too early to make up my mind. Hmm. Oil and gas engineering services seems to be my expertise. Technically speaking, it is not only restricted to a hydrocarbon processing which may be applied for upstream / downstream job but it is also widely applicable to numbers of end products processing work. Now, I don’t know exactly which area I should specialize on. It is just a matter of interest and long term thinking towards my career growth. Basically, a chemical engineer can get involved in those mentioned areas by shifting their profound skilled and apply it to that particular new area whenever relevant. Of course, it is not an easy job. It will be the same fundamentally but the approach, guidelines, study and analysis involved will not be the same in dealing with different products / components. But now, oil and gas sector is booming. It can be expected that oil and gas resources will last for another more than 50 years. I hope so. Hence, I think I will stick in this area. Currently, I am providing technical and engineering support for a chemical plant project. It is totally different from my previous projects in term of nature of project, licensor’s technology implementation, dealing with non-hydrocarbon products and unit operations concerned. It involves a lot of things when it comes to detailed design engineering phase. It may also be a hectic job if it involves a lot of design modifications at this stage. Personally, I love the healthy pressure experienced in this project. It really provides me a momentum and enhances my knowledge development to solve some specific problems by myself. Here, I really need to be independent. It is just like, “I give it to you, I want it back, DONE.” More or less like that. Sometimes I feel very depressed with the approach I took towards the tasks assigned for me. Of course, it was due to the tight time constraints. Because of that, I am not really appreciating the work so much since the aim was just to complete the task within the time frame. I don’t have much time to know the details behind that particular task. For example, within this week, I have been assigned to review and check some instrumentations sizing. Essentially, I know pretty well how to do it but I have to bear in mind that now I am working in a chemical plant project which involves a lot of variations in chemical substances or components and it may requires an extra and additional knowledge to deal with such services. Moreover, the well-known process steady state simulator also will not be able to best represent the fluids involved i.e. aqueous solution. So, it takes some time for me to complete the task and occasionally it took minutes just to find some thermal properties from the handbook! Yeah, I love my job.