Katherine Allen joined the Sydney office of the infrastructure firm CVK Atlantis after graduating as a chemical engineer from the University of New South Wales. CVK Atlantis is what is called a full service engineering firm. This means that CVK Atlantis are engaged in traditional consulting work such as option reports, environmental impact assessments, design work and other activities where CVK Atlantis represent clients engaged in large infrastructure projects.

CVK Atlantis also takes equity positions in large projects and works as the contractor on the delivery of the project.

Katherine joined the water and environmental division as a junior process engineer. On her first day in the office she was assigned to a team assessing options for the treatment of organic solvents collected in a landfill leachate system.

Her job was to assist the process engineer to develop information on process performance, treatment cost, ease of operation and track record for a suite of different alternatives. This project was scheduled to run for four weeks and Katherine was required to attend meetings with the client, research information and prepare material for the final report.

In the first few weeks Katherine began to learn how the office worked; the process of bidding projects and responding to tenders; managing clients; managing projects; meeting deadlines and producing reports. While Katherine was working on the lechate project, CVK Atlantis was part of a joint venture that was awarded a contract for the design and construction of a large water treatment plant at a refinery in Western Australia. Many of the staff needed to resource the project were located in the Sydney office and Katherine soon found herself assigned to the team responsible for the design of the chemical storage and handling facility.

In this role Katherine found herself working with mechanical engineers, civil engineers and electrical engineers as they worked out the details associated with the delivery, storage, dosing and collection of chemicals on the site. Katherine’s boss on this project, Clare Potter – also a chemical engineer – showed Katherine how the design begins with a process flow sheet to determine the quantities, dosing sequences and storage requirements for all the chemical additions in the treatment plant.

Katherine’s job was to take information from the flow sheet and develop design schedules that would be used by the procurement manager to obtain prices for the equipment that CVK Atlantis and the JV were going to install. Clare was very impressed with Katherine’s organisational skills and nominated her to work for a week with the group based in Perth which will be looking at the Preliminary Hazard and Operability issues of the chemical system.

This will involve a weekly meeting with the operators at the refinery and making sure that the chemical system contains all the necessary features to safely monitor and control the chemical system. The experience was invaluable. Katherine learnt that engineering is more than design rules and calculations and is about building systems that can be operated safely and efficiently. Returning to Sydney,

Katherine discovers that the client has questions on the leachate project and she will be required to attend a meeting to go over some of the information on treatment options she prepared for the report. At the same time Katherine learns that a large plastic plant is also having problems with managing liquid waste and has called for tenders to do a feasibility study for the development of an on-site treatments system, she is assigned the task of collecting the company’s experience in this area for the tender submission.

The weeks progress in much the same way – Katherine is presented with a range of problems that require her analytical skills (chemical handling design), her research and presentation skills (leachate project) and her people and listening skills (Hazard studies and client meetings). More importantly, Katherine is observing that the people running the business, developing the projects, winning bids and marketing the firm all have background in engineering. In fact, Clare has become a mentor for Katherine and reminds her that if she is organised, manages her time well and can work with people there are many careers paths that she can pursue at CVK Atlantis. In her first year Katherine’s days are busy, working on different projects, with different challenges that require a range of solutions all with different deadlines.

By the end of the first year the project in Perth has moved into construction and the construction manager wants a junior process engineer to work as part of the team commissioning the chemical system so Katherine will move to Perth for a month. But before she leaves she will need to attend her first meeting on the next stage of the landfill project where the client will seek proposals to implement one of the processes Katherine and the other team members recommended earlier in the year. Katherine’s job is interesting, occasionally demanding but certainly never dull.