Work has been pretty light this week...my office outlook email has been pretty quiet too...With boss being outstationed and one of my senior engineers doing reservist, I could finally take a breathe at work, a relief after doing so many OT hours for the past 2 weeks...
I have been trying hard to answer all the questions that are always running in my mind daily...With more exposure at job, with the experience for the past 3 months, i still think it's too early to decide if this is what i really want.
Firstly, i cant even answer this question with a complete certainty:
Is money my motivation of working?Or
is it the satisfaction of being a consultant, who can one day proudly claim that I was involved in the development of this building...of that building...?Or
is it the satisfaction of being one of the few girls in this male-dominated field?The latter is losing its importance in my mind right now, even though I love to be "the only girl on the round/rectangular table", or like what my colleague (the one who always bullies me) said, to be 'Miss Thorn' (instead of the rose among the thorns), simply because no matter what I do, a lady will always be a lady...I will never be able to talk to contractors or suppliers or project managers (who are mostly males), in a man-to-man kind of conversation. There will always be a gap, a gap that I predict to be a bit hard to cross to bring myself to the same level as men...Being in this consulting industry, in which we rely on our professional fees, makes it worse as we need to build a good rapport with these men...My senior, thought otherwise. According to him, being a lady has an advantage, as the contractors, or other parties usually will not scream, shout and curse at each other during meetings, in the presence of a lady...and you'll tend to get a better treatment simply because you wear skirt (i.e you are a lady). His comments are partially true, but i really still think that there is no way I could be on par with men in this field! This pessimistic thought is the one that tends to spark another thought of settling down soon and becoming a housewife, or better still a taitai,haha...
I am learning a lot everyday at work: technical concepts, real applications, and most importantly how to handle people of different working styles, characters, and attitudes...I was warned by my interviewer that the learning curve of a consultant in this industry is very steep for the first few years...True enough, I still remembered my first few days at work, when I was so intimidated by my colleagues, who were talking on the phone about all the things that were so unfamiliar to me and whose desks were full of A1-sized drawings to be checked...Every day I used to wonder,
what are we supposed to check? What if i dont know what to look up on the drawings? What if i cant even decipher the drawings? My days were simply filled with questions...What is meeting in this industry like? What do they discuss during meetings? If i were to attend the meeting alone, how scary would it be? If i dont know how to answer the questions during meetings, what am i supposed to do? When I was given my first Condominium project and when the architect sent me the architectural drawings and asked me for the M&E space, I was stunned. I remembered staring at the drawings, like a sotong, and asking to myself,
" What am i supposed to do with these drawings?", "What are the spaces that I need to inform the architect?", "How do i know how big should the spaces be?"The answers to all of these questions were slowly unraveled days by days, weeks by weeks, months by months, as my experience starts to build up...Having answered all those questions do not free my mind from other questions...Honestly, everyday at work I'm still asking a lot of questions...I made mistakes, I corrected them, I promised myself not to repeat the same mistakes again...There is simply no end to this learning process!
