Flavia Purnomo, Graduate Engineer at Contact Energy
Bachelor of Chemical & Materials Engineering, University of Auckland.
Tell us about your job:
My role is based in Wairakei, and the mahi happening here is all about managing our geothermal assets – existing ones like Te Mihi and Wairakei; and new ones like Tauhara power station and GeoFutures. My first rotation has been with the Generation Optimisation team who are responsible for optimising our geothermal generation profile by looking at the “supply” (the wells side) vs “demand” (the station side), taking into account a number of limits/availability (like consents, budget, steamfield/station activities) and market consideration. This is a great area to start as the work has a bit of everything, from reservoirs and process engineering, a touch of financials, to digitalisation. In the next six months I will be working with the team to build a calibration model for Contact’s steam field assets. It has been fascinating to see how fundamental process engineering concepts I learned in university are making sense when I’m putting them into practice.
What's your background?
I was born in Indonesia, and grew up in a strong education culture, which pretty much has shaped me into an academic-centered person. I moved to New Zealand about four years ago for university study and it was such a massive shift for me to be in a completely different environment, both academic and life-wise, but what’s life without challenges, right? I struggled with my English at the start, socialising was tricky, and my academic performance significantly dropped. I found value as an engineer-to-be through looking for graduate roles – I liked the idea of putting all the hard work to use in an exciting role. The transition from being an engineering “student” to an engineer-in-training had changed a lot of things since then, it changed how I viewed academics and life in general, it guided me to find my feet, it restored my self-confidence back too. When I entered the final year of my study and started looking for graduate jobs, I had the principle not to limit my options and give everything a go. The Contact graduate programme really sparked my interest, so I was quite all-in and decided to put an extra mile into every single recruitment process. Being in the programme is a steep learning curve, but I enjoy each opportunity to explore and challenge myself.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes! People are really happy to teach things, not only technical knowledge specific to the industry but also things that’d help me to transition into working life from university. Someone with another background could do this role, I’d just say you need to be open to learn things. Just be honest of what you do know and what you do not know can be really helpful.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
As much as I love the process engineering-specific tasks in my current rotation, I also love the collaboration aspect of the job. It fascinates me how all these different teams work together and give their best to achieve common goals. The task I’ve enjoyed the most is the morning report training, where I will need to report the previous day’s generation figures and trace back on what happened out there in the field/station that resulted in those numbers. It is quite cool to carry out that “detective work” and it shows me how instrumental data and calculations are in a practical environment.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...
Be open to learn new things
Make the time to socialise and building networks
Whenever in doubt, don’t assume, just ask. People will be happy to help.