Last year in your position I couldn’t think what specific questions to ask, so I’ll go ahead and say the main good things and bad things about my experience. Keep in mind we’re working for LBS which was meant to be the least organised of the 4 companies (and may not be employing for your year)and we’re just over 3 months into it. Firstly this has been probably the best decision of my life deciding to do this. The lifestyle that I’m living out here is amazing, with student finance and the salary combined which we make: I am making the equivalent of above £30,000) in the UK and considering our company gave us a car that’s insured etc. (it does work) and also our accommodation, it is safe to say it’s so easy to live comfortably and have amazing weekends (our monthly salary is RM$1700 which if you break it down is just over £2 an hour haha, but student loan stretches very far). Just remember you will most likely enjoy this set-up so much, you won’t come back with any money and probably dip into your savings; you will do this out of choice because that £300 would stretch to a long amazing South Asia holiday, whilst at home you would need to only do a week’s work to make it back. If you are serious about working solely for engineering work experience and in particularly for money and not for life experience, this placement isn’t exactly for you. Although keep in mind 2 years ago a guy got a job with a BEng (plus this Malaysia year in industry) over a guy with a PHD in the subject. So far the biggest meal that I have cooked for myself is a protein shake, and even that seems taxing these days! Having all my clothes washed dried and folded costs maximum £2, a full clean shave (lads) is about £1 and petrol is about 44p/litre. The travel is one of the best things about this; because of all the mixed ethnicities between Chinese/Muslim malays and us Westerners over here there are lots of holidays that can easily link up. For example come Chinese new year, by booking 2 days off work we get 10 days off! This year so far (3 months) our guys have been around Malaysia, went to MotoGp, ran the Singapore marathon last week (satisfying to finish but far too much effort), a rugby/social tour in Phillipines with an Expat team and some of us are campervanning around Australia for Christmas and NYE. Now planning a Hong Kong 7s weekend, Indonesia and Bali (best surfing place in the world arguably), F1 racing, Vietnam and most likely Singapore again, I can’t see a better style to travel this side of the world. Personally I love travelling and if I had worked in the UK all year and saved up my money, I would be spending most of it on travelling this side of the world anyways so this seemed the best option. At the start the 7 of us (in LBS), were split up into 3 people South of Kuala Lumpur working (AKA KL, capital Malaysia) 2 people more central KL and then 2 people further up North in a place called Cameron Highlands which is basically a holiday retreat. This could have been a problem but with 3 of us with a car and the other 2 with public coaches to KL, we see each other almost every single weekend. All of the lads here get on well and have the same attitude about balancing work/travel/play which really ads to the experience and we are all pushing each other on. We truly make the best of any time we get off work The work side of things: myself and Sealy work on site at a project called D’Island, which essentially an artificial island being constructed for high end luxury houses. In technical terms, we are essentially acting as clients for LBS Bina (guys with lots of money) and signing off work that we deem to be up to acceptable standard that we would expect (UK has higher standard, hence these companies are keen to get us all out here), finished by the main contractor and their nominated sub-contractors (we only deal with the main contractor). Currently, due to the timing of this placement, we have spent quite a lot of time signing of finishing works such as plumbing and tiling, but an entire batch of houses is getting underway, so we have supervised piling and our boss is insisting that we watch these buildings get made from foundations to the roof and every bit of plumping/electrics in between. The company really look out for us, there was a piling test that we needed to observe for the end of year work (there’s some assignments you need to do throughout this sandwich year, very straightforward though, designing a poster is 10% of it haha (sorry Bruce)) but one of the workers here forgot to tell us and did it anyway; our big boss found out about this and made the main contractors do another test. I personally really like this job because it’s very hands on because it’s on site but I have no idea what other companies here do so you should ask other lads here more specifically, I’ll post everyone’s names and what they do later. I don’t really want to make this post longer than it needs to be, but in summary: this is the best year of my life. I do a job that I enjoy and get to travel the best places in the world at the weekends and get time off to do so. Having not enjoyed one, this year almost seems like a gap year to me and not coming from a very rich family, I thoroughly enjoy living a rich lifestyle. Seriously ask us any questions you have, were happy to answer anything!
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 02:22:35 +0000