What's your job about?
The Te Ahu a Turanga Alliance are building a replacement highway for the permanently closed Manawatu Gorge section of State Highway 3, with myself being responsible for general site engineering tasks across one of the four major work zones.
While my role exposes me to a variety of work disciplines in any one day, the current stage of the project gives me heavy involvement in major earthworks, drainage and utilities work. This includes organising and overseeing soil testing, conducting land surveys, some basic design work and general programme management in conjunction with our crews on site.
While maintaining progress throughout the site is an incredibly important aspect of the role, so too is quality assurance. As such, a day is as much physical work as it is investigating and reporting on works completed to ensure requirements and expectations are satisfied. As the project progresses further I will become involved in even more disciplines of engineering, such as pavements and structures as they become relevant.
The role is undoubtedly a complex and multifaceted one, only made more spectacular by being able to spend my days working between the turbines of the Te Āpiti windfarm.
What's your background?
I grew up just fifteen minutes down the road from my current project, on a dairy farm between Woodville and Dannevirke. Much of the first 18 years of my life were spent within the district, attending local schools and ever-pondering exactly what I aspired to be later in life. The thought process developed somewhere along the lines of becoming a builder, to an architect, to an urban planner, and finally – a civil engineer. In 2015, I chased that aspiration to the University of Auckland, where I spent the next few years studying towards my bachelor’s degree, also working part-time for my first few years as a swimming instructor.
As fate had it, my first summer internship within the civil industry would take me to Rarotonga in 2018, where I was introduced to and trained in land and construction surveying, but also given the opportunity to reawaken and further develop my high school experience in CAD draughting. This set the paving stones towards my first placement with Fulton Hogan, as a survey CAD operator on a busway project in East Auckland. I spent the next three years on this project, completing my studies in the meantime, but also gaining a broadened experience of transportation projects. This eventually led me back to my stomping grounds, where I now assist in developing a solution to the gorge closures which affected me and my home community for years. As with anything, I believe an emotional investment is a brilliant motivator for committing to a given task.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
The world is abundant in incredibly gifted and talented people. Could someone out there with an entirely different background pick up a similar role and succeed? Undoubtedly! Though that isn’t to discredit the value of contextual experience. A site engineer’s role, or that of a surveyor, considering the time I’ve spent in both, each carry their own niche of learning points, working protocols and even languages. Therefore any prior exposure to the profession, either through studying or working, will inevitably pay off in multitudes towards one’s competence within a role. Above all else, however, the ability to clearly and concisely communicate with others is key!
What's the coolest thing about your job?
I greatly enjoy the physical nature of my role. After spending a significant amount of time working almost entirely from behind a desk, I started to miss the exercise and even the feeling of making physical progress that comes with working on-site. It could be as simple of a task as installing fences or environmental protection, or as extensive as setting out and tracking earthworks progress, but getting hands-on and being able to see the differences you’ve made is always an incredibly satisfying feeling.
What are the limitations of your job?
While I’ve always prided myself on my punctuality in getting to work, I have admittedly never been a morning person. The early pre-start meetings that are characteristic of the industry often mean you are waking up and arriving at work while it is still dark, and it can be a struggle to maintain an appropriate sleep schedule to lessen the risk of burning out in the middle of the day. The role also carries a substantial amount of responsibility in terms of both scheduling and record-keeping, so get used to maintaining a fairly comprehensive daily diary!
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...
I would have reminded myself earlier that studying full-time was by no means compulsory, and advised myself to secure an internship as early as possible. I personally found that breaking down my degree to study fewer papers at a time, all the while working part-time within the industry paid dividends towards my theoretical learnings and levels of practical exposure. However, with all that work must come rest – something I often ignored at crunch-times. My final piece of advice would therefore be to value the efficiency of a well-rested mind over the comparatively lacklustre-performance of a tired mind working past midnight.