What's your job about?

Starting as a graduate engineer, South32’s Worsley Alumina Refinery was the ideal place for me to kick-start my career. South32 is a global metals and mining company and, as a part of that, Worsley mines bauxite and refines it to alumina as part of the aluminum value chain. The complex refining process means Worsley is a playground for a mechanical engineer, giving me experience working on a variety of equipment, from pumps and pipes to tanks, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, blowers, conveyors, calciners, power stations and much more. 

During the graduate program, I rotated through various teams, including engineering design, maintenance, analytics and improvement. In the design team, I had to use technical skills to design piping systems; risk assessing the design, creating scopes of work to execute the implementation of these in the field and finally, commissioning them. This gave me exposure to our capital projects process and how these projects are managed through their life cycle. Working in the maintenance and reliability teams, a key task was to analyse reoccurring failures and come up with maintenance strategies to remove or reduce these breakdowns to create a safer working environment and prevent production losses. Rotating through different teams, as a part of the graduate program, allowed me to interact with people across the business and gave me valuable insight into the various roles and pathways an engineer can take in their career. It has helped me make informed decisions on how to mould my future pathway and led me to a reliability engineer role two years out of the graduate program.

What's your background?

Although I was born in Perth, the first three years of my life were spent in Mumbai, India, living with my dad’s extended family. These years shaped my core values and beliefs and taught me about my heritage and culture. Moving back to Perth when I was four meant I did all my schooling there. In primary school, I was an outgoing, outdoorsy and hands-on kid, and I built a love for sports and taking apart old things like phones, speakers and washing machines to see how they worked. Going into high school, the social complexities made me quiet, and I retracted into my shell. Loving chemistry and math in high school meant I almost did pharmacy but at the last minute changed to engineering. This decision was a defining moment as I love what I do today. Leveraging my inquisitive mind is a big part of what I do as a reliability engineer; figuring out the inner workings of equipment to problem solve maintenance strategies to prevent them from failing. The other key turning point in my life was choosing the Worsley graduate program over other options in the Perth CBD. I am driven by being able to make an impact and Worsley has empowered me to do so through having to complete critical work during my graduate program. And now in my current role I am responsible for the reliability of all assets in one of five areas at Worsley! This has helped me come out of my shell and keeps me engaged and coming back to work with a smile on my face!

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Mechanical engineering is a very vast field. You can easily go down a technical pathway and become an expert in mechanical design or a subject matter expert on various equipment. You could also take a problem-solving and analytical pathway or even go down a managerial route leading projects and/or people! The graduate program helped me decide to take an analytical and problem-solving pathway, aspiring towards leadership in the future. I strongly believe anyone can follow this path as no specific technical skills are required. The key is to be able to think critically, problem solve and manage various stakeholders.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

What I loved most about being a graduate at Worsley was being empowered to create scopes of work and give technical direction from the get-go. Having that trust from colleagues has really empowered me to be able to lead maintenance teams to do work that has a positive impact on our equipment’s reliability. The other thing I find super cool is that whatever design scope I put together, a couple of weeks later, I can walk out into the plant and see it installed and working on-site!

What are the limitations of your job?

A limitation during one part of my graduate program was due to people changing roles, bad timings with sicknesses and team members going on leave. At one point, I was the only South32 mechanical engineer in the design team! This initially stressed me out but the good thing about working at a 40-year-old refinery with many long-standing employees was I was able to lean on other very experienced mechanical engineers in other teams for complex questions. This actually ended up fast-tracking my learning and growth!

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

1. Firstly, I would tell myself to use the holidays better as a university student to travel abroad more and visit family back in India.
2. My second tip would be to go out of your comfort zone as much as possible. I have found this is the best way to grow as a person.
3. Thirdly, when solving questions at university, think about the context behind the question. If you just blindly put numbers in a formula to get an answer you won’t realise the real-world significance and how that question could help you at work in the future.