MY WORK HISTORY

 

MY WORK HISTORY 

According to the to-do list that I made some days before, the second entry below that of taking the IELTS test is job hunting, that's the reason why I write about this topic today. 

In this post, I'm going to write about my childhood dreams, jobs that I used to experience in the past and my career aspiration for a better future. 

My childhood dreams

I'm nothing special. At least that is what I have realized at the age of 26, but winding the timeline back nearly 20 years, I really knew nothing, I didn't see the truths about us, humans, about how tiny we are compared to the universe. I thought I was special and unique and I would become someone important some days, someone really really great. I had dreamed of becoming a prime minister, a writer, a journalist or an English teacher. I did make it in some fields and still, what I haven't achieved gradually diminished along with the devastation that the adult world has caused to me. 

My choices

And then, I kept going to school as a normal student lost in my wonderland, entered high school and in the senior year, just like any other kids, I had to make the first career decision in my life in the path of becoming an adult. That time, my one and only choice was HCMC University of Laws. Me of about 10 years ago was a girl who tried to fight her own battle against evil, fought for the rights, seeking a righteous direction, a young girl of integrity who turned a blind eye to human nature, insisted on inclining to the bright side of the society. I guess these things well explain why I decided to become a lawyer back to the day. 

Ironically, I failed the university entrance exam, as how I knew I would be because I didn't study hard enough, just a fleeting glance at everything called big events. I had never tried my best to study all those 12 years of going to school but notwithstanding I always got good results and ranked in the top 5 of my classes some years. Beside from that reason, there was a hilarious incident happened the day I took my Math exam, I had really bad diarrhea and severe pain in my stomach, hence my result went down the same path as how my diarrhea was, very bad, under average, only 4/10. My English and Physics test were okay, 8 and 6.5 respectively, so I thought it was not a big problem and insisted on going back to my hometown to watch the season finale of True Blood even though I had a Literature test the day after. Stubbornly, I didn't take the test which made my mom really upset about me. 

Then whatever happens is meant to happen, I had to make decisions again with my second college aspirations. Those decisions were made due to my story which I was working on that time under the name Epinephrine: Undersea treasures. The story follows a young girl at her 25 solving the mystery behind a highly auctioned gem by which she has to make good use of her knowledge on library and geology. Therefore, I decided to register for two different undergraduate where offer these courses. Somehow, I ended up going for geology.

I came to geology by that happenstance. Still the same, I went to school everyday and practiced rote learning, I graduated as the valedictorian of my department. I was granted every scholarship each semester and never had to pay fees without receiving them back. Everything happened to me smoothly, I had never experienced failures, until now. Rote learning and playing safe cost me dearly. 

My very first jobs

In my student days, I used to write for a digital magazine called Songmoi.vn with royalty payment of 100 thousand VND/article. I didn't have much motivation to write constantly so I only wrote 1 article each month, and after 2 years, I only gained about 2 million VND. 

After graduating, my best friend and I opened a street vendor business to get used to with it. We asked my friend's brother to build us a cabinet and we decorated everything together cheerfully and enthusiastically. During the time running the business, I had to wake up very early to go to my vendor and went home late to buy meat and prepared the foods until late night. Our business lasted for a month then disbanded and it also profoundly affected our relationship. We fought almost everyday, because we all possessed that same massive ego. 

After that, I had done a lot of freelance jobs including making subtitles for movies, teaching English online, and I also kept looking for a full-time job to get to know the environment of a realistic workplace as well as benefits it offers, it's sort of like the adult world. After 4 months graduated from school, I went for several interviews and I got accepted by 3 companies. But I decided to work for B.R Design Consultant Company and I would never regret my decision. During the period of working full-time at B.R Company, I still freelanced for TOPICA NATIVE until the third semester of my second degree in Chinese to focus on my studying.

Bonding days with B.R Company

The first time I met my boss, Mr. Hoang Thanh Hai, was in my interview with B.R and he was in charge of interviewing me. My boss is a man in his early 50s with a tall body shape, skinny but with a protruding pot belly. Behind his nearsighted glasses of more than 10 diopters is a pair of small eyes similar to those of Chinese descent. Anyway, he has a very impressive and special appearance. He is quite "rebellious" on political matters, his sayings all imply something really profound by which if you're not working with him long enough, you won't understand what he really means. My colleagues always make fun of his messages in Skype every time he shows his eristic side. There was time I talked to one of my colleagues, also my junior in university, that I should have taken screenshots of his texts to make a notorious collection." 

My department, geotechnical department, is like the black sheep of the company, so it was located some buildings away from the headquarter. That time, every morning I arrived my company to clock in and I had to walk from the headquarter about 5 minutes to arrive my department to work, then walked back to the headquarter to clock out at the end of the day. 

My department is divided into 2 sectors, the laboratory and the engineering office. Those 6 months of probation period, I had to work in a two-story house isolated from the headquarter including the laboratory on the first floor and the engineering office upstairs. Our laboratory's code name is LASXD-664 and we perform specific tests to determine the physical properties of soil as well as in-situ tests as parts of geotechnical investigation. 

After my probation period, also after Tet holiday of the year 2019, the construction of the new building of my company was completed and we moved into there, a place called B.R Office Building located in Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone. It is a seven-story building with a basement and hilariously we again were arranged somewhere isolated from the common workplace of every other departments, the basement. I've got to admit that our place is quite spacious for a laboratory of 6 people along with machines and equipment designed for specific tests, but it is in the basement with almost no sunlight and fresh air. Let's talk briefly about my company, It's a bridge and road design company where many young male engineers with shiny appearances work at. They look super well-educated and full of fortune confidently entering the foyer and riding the elevator to go up to their floors, which makes testers in the basement like us so dull because all we do is working with soil, dirt and mud. 

Over two and a half years working at B.R, I have learned a lot of lessons. I was taught to do things that I had never had a chance to do before; I was disciplined to fit in with other people and to meet the expectations of my boss as well as the requirements of my job as a tester and an engineer. I could perform almost every required laboratory test to investigate the characteristics of soil for construction. I didn't hesitate to do any physical labor works. Beside from testing, I was also required to translate reports and documents into different languages, create excel files with automatic calculations based on certain standards, research standards and new methods for higher performance. My relationship with colleagues is also really great, everybody loves me and we still keep in touch. I really admire my boss and other engineers in my department because of the way they devote themselves to the geotechnical field in Vietnam.  

But you know what? Just as any young people of my age, I couldn't stand the day-to-day of monotony of working life, I was too bored with tedious repetition that I had to wake up every morning to go to work and do the exact same things everyday. I had always been bearing in my mind the thought of quitting my job, but it took me more than two years to actually turn my thought into reality. The last day I walked out of my office, I sighed in relief and was overjoyed, I came back home and threw a party myself without realizing how wrong I had been. 

Up to this day, my career perspective is completely different from it was the time I worked at B.R. Now, I am finally enlightened, I have realized that going to work is not meant for looking for a friend or a safe place to settle down, but in fact, going to work is a precious opportunity to utilize a potential environment to seize every chance that comes to you, face challenges and improve your profile. The most important thing is, overcoming challenges and learning from mistakes. 

My dream job

I didn't become fully aware of what makes me truly happy, until very recently. You possibly figure it out when reading these lines, right? I want to be a speaker, I want to share my experiences and lessons that I have learned as well as the way I overcome my challenges and acquire what I yearn for. I hope to stand in front of a lot of people and use my words to motivate young people and individuals who are looking for their identities to decide what is best for them, to not to struggle with difficulties as I did. 

Conclusion

However, the path to achieving that dream is still so far away. I still have to fight for the scholarship and successfully take it that I will be able to share my experiences to you. Now my exigency is finding a job to work in this one year long to weight down the burden of finance on my living and my research paper.