Emily Mace

I am a graduate environmental consultant, specialising in air quality. I provide technical air quality advice to assist clients (mostly industrial) in getting resource consent for their discharges to air. In most cases, this involves preparing a report that details the effects of their air emissions on the receiving environment. I often spend a lot of time looking at data (meteorological and ambient air quality) and undertaking to model to inform the assessment. I also assist the contaminated land team (primarily with fieldwork) or the land landfill team (primarily by collating existing data) when they need it.

7.10 AM – 7.50 AM

I would not describe myself as a morning person, but nor would I describe myself as an evening person. As a result, my wake-up time and morning routine are highly variable; ranging from heading to work straight after rolling out of bed to getting up to shower and eat breakfast before heading to work. 

7.50 AM  - 8:05 AM

As expected, my unpredictable wake up time leads to an unpredictable leaving time. My favourite way to commute to work is walking but sometimes my partner drops me off to work on the way if the weather is grim.

8.10 AM – 8.25 AM 

I arrive at work and head straight to our office Café to make myself a cup of tea – English breakfast, strong, full cream milk. Then head to my desk to start my day, although sometimes I swing past the jigsaw puzzle desk to see if I can put a piece in.

 

8.30 AM 

I generally begin my workday scrolling through emails – identifying those that need addressing that day, filing the project related ones, and deleting the not so important ones.

8.45 AM 

It’s time to start project work, the nature of air quality work is that projects tend to be small to medium in size in comparison to other areas of the business. (lasting weeks to months rather than years). This means I am often juggling multiple projects at once, so I need to decide if I am in the mood to have multiple projects open at once or if I am going to focus on one project. Having fingers in contaminated land work and landfill work also further adds to the juggling that I love to do. Flicking to my calendar to check out my meeting schedule often helps me decide this. If there are no meetings scheduled for the morning, I tend to focus on one project: this could mean getting stuck into some, data analysis, calculations, and/or report writing. If there are meetings breaking up the morning, I tend to do little bits for lots of projects – phone calls to clients, addressing the emails identified earlier, setting up or processing models, creating figures.

9.00 AM 

If I need help on a project, I often schedule a meeting with my project manager for this time so that I have the day to address the project while the information is still fresh in my brain.

10.00 AM

The morning tea and coffee has been served so I go the café to grab a cup and have a quick chat to some collegues.

12.00 PM 

I am religiously either restless or hungry at this time so it’s time to recruit some colleagues to have lunch with me – even better if I can convince them to sit outside! Often after eating I head for a walk around town to refresh myself before heading back to the office for the afternoon work.

1.00 PM 

If I am having a scatter brain day my desktop may now look like this. So I may spend a few minutes closing some windows if I don’t think I am going to work on those tasks again today.

3:30 PM

A lot of people are surprised to find out that air quality work is more desk based than field based. This means I work on projects all over the country (and sometimes Australia too). The work we do is therefore not restricted to the offices we are in. To communicate between offices the Air Quality team (11 of us over 4 different offices) meet for our weekly resourcing meeting via Microsoft Teams Meets. This involves providing updates on the current projects we are working, whether we are still on track to meet deadlines, and opportunity for anyone to voice if they need any help. We then talk about potential upcoming work and determine if we have the capacity to undertake a new job. If we believe we have the capacity we then establish who will be the key players to undertake the job, what role each member will play, and who will write the proposal to hopefully win the work. As a grad this a great opportunity to either voice interest in new project work or ask who would be best suited to provide advice on a current project.

4:30 PM - 5.30 PM

Home time! My leave time is variable depending on my evening activities or how stuck into a task I am. I love sport and have a passion for coaching as well as science – I often like to say I am a scientist by day and coach by night. as a result my evenings are often filled with coaching (cheerleading) or doing some admin work for the teams I coach. If it is a sport-free evening I like to spend my evenings playing boardgames, reading, or socialising with friends.