My 1st day of Industrial Attachment @ CAAS

Today was the first day of my internship with the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore. This will be a loooooooooong detailed account of my eventful day.

Guess what time I had to wake up this morning? Now, don’t faint. 5.50am! Thankfully, I got ready my stuff the night before, so I didn’t really have to panic so early in the morning. Left the house at about 6.35am.. and as I walked out, I passed this aunty. She said something to me in chinese which seemed to indicate the bus was going to leave soon. At first, I was thinking, “what bus?”… but it a peek at the bus parking lot, it dawned upon me that the condo shuttle bus actually started that early! Wonderful. A free direct ride to Boon Lay MRT. Finally reached Boon Lay at about 6.45am and met SC at Lakeside at 6.50am. Finally after an hour, we reached Changi Airport at 7.50am. Still very early. Plenty of time to spare. Tml we can start out later.

We waited at the CAAS reception and a nice Malay lady came to take us in to the many many security doors in the CAAS office. Dumped us off at the meeting room to wait for Ms Nellie Wee to come and brief us. The briefing was pretty much as expected. Giving us information on the different types of jobs and projects we would be undertaking during our term of internship, and going through the important issues. Much to my disappointment was the low pay, but later on today, I came to terms with the fact that I have to give and take. The job scope sounds fun. So, I think that can make up for it. On the other hand, we were thrilled to hear that Friday is dress-down day… so casual attire is fine on that day. We also learnt that many of us might face the possibility of being deployed to Terminal 3 as it is scheduled to start operations on this Wednesday, 9 January 2008. I foresee a wonderful opportunity to learn interesting things as it is not everyday a new airport terminal opens. We were allocated to our different departments and some passes for the 4th floor office were given out. I secretly hoped really hard that I would not be getting those coz that would mean I would only have access to the office and not the transit areas. Thankfully, I wasn’t one of those. I was assigned to Airport Management under Miss Puspa Parikh. After the briefing, we waited for our supervisors to come pick us up.

SC’s supervisor, Jane, and 2 poly interns, Rooney and Felicia, came to pick us 6 of us who were to be assigned to the Airport Management Division. SC, Kim, Lydia, Chin Wei, Weixiong and me. Jane asked for 2 volunteers to help Puspa. So SC and I being in front, we decided to volunteer ourselves. And that was the start of never never ending work!

Lunch was at 1pm. we interns had lunch together at the staff canteen. Listya also joined us. Halfway through our lunch, we were summoned to go help Puspa at Terminal 3. Took a ride to the Airport Police Division to process Seasonal Passes for the new roving staff. Didn’t anticipate that we would be doing overtime on our very first day! We finished at the APD at about 8pm. At first Puspa said we could take time off and come in for work at 10.30am the next day, but we found out later that we had to apply for our own passes at 8.30am! Grrrr… We went back to the CAAS office in Terminal 2 to get our stuff and left at about 9pm. By the time I reached home, it was 11pm! Faint… tml must wake up at 6am again! Sucks.