Eng-1 School Intro

I arrived in Abu Dhabi for my Engineering-1 school 2 weeks ago today. Now for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll back up a little. As part of my training I am sent off to school for 9 weeks of intensive learning. I spend 9 hours a day, 5 days a week in the classroom, on the rig, or in the shop learning how to do my job. Then go home and do homework and study for the rest of the day. Now you might ask, what were the past 5 years of university for then? Basically they were to get me to the point that I can understand, absorb, and then regurgitate all this information I’m getting in a very short time.

After Mines it might not sound very hard. And really it’s not. Except that the stakes are infinitely higher. At school, studying for a test was very abstract. ‘What happens if I fail this test?’ – my class grade goes down, maybe I have to retake the course, maybe I stay an extra year at school, maybe I lose a scholarship, maybe I get yelled at by my parents, maybe I make my teacher angry etc… Here, studying for a test is very concrete.  If I fail this test, I get a warning letter from the company, my boss finds out and if I fail two tests I get two warning letters and lose my job. Not to mention, if you don’t understand what you’re doing at my work, you can lose the company hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars with one small mistake. The incentive to study is infinitely greater.

One of the things I’m enjoying very much about my time here is the facility.  We’re very far from the city, which is a pain at times. But I get to wake up and see a drilling rig in my window and anyone who knows me can tell you how happy that makes me. Here we get our own rig to play with, our own set of tools to experiment with.  There is no company man to please, no downtime to worry about. It’s all about what you’re learning.  We stay in hotel-like rooms. We can take all our meals in the cafeteria. There’s an indoor gym, an outdoor soccer pitch, a Wii room, a video room, a room full of bean bags (strangely called the board-game room), and tons of ping-pong and foosball tables everywhere. Basically, they try to create the best environment in which to learn while simultaneously trying to distract you.

The second thing I’m enjoying here, more than the facility, are the people I get to interact with everyday.  My class is 19 people and we work or come from every continent. We have people who are either from or work in China, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Angola, Austria, Romania, Germany, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Norway and the UK. And in all these places scattered all across the globe, we’re all doing the same thing. It blows my mind to sit in a discussion and find out how simple practice is carried out slightly differently across like 15 countries. When we go out to the bars, we’ve started a practice of toasting in every language.  The process takes a little longer, but has definitely expanded our horizons!

Next time, I’ll write more about Abu Dhabi and UAE in general, but I wanted everyone to understand what I’m doing and what I’ll be spending the next 7 weeks doing. It will also help explain why you’re not seeing pictures from exciting tourist destinations all across UAE. In the meantime, I’ll link you to unedited bar pictures. You have been warned by the ‘unedited’.