Category: Noah

Working at Triac has taught me that this industry can be incredibly diverse. You have a lot of freedom as to what your day to day lifestyle will be as a mechanical engineer when entering the field. You can sit at a desk and design all day or, if design isn’t exciting, you can be involved in the manufacturing process. There are so many different paths you can take professionally, which makes me happy I chose mechanical engineering. 

However, this industry isn’t too kind on the lazy. Regardless of what you end up doing, it will be hard work. All day, every day at Triac the engineers are working non-stop. They are constantly designing or overseeing and helping with manufacturing. It is such an iterative process of learning and relearning that our engineers are constantly having to brush up on old studies. There is always more to be done. There is always more to improve. That philosophy should be at the core of every engineer’s belief system. It is not lost upon those here at Triac. Technology is always evolving and the machines we use all have their own programs. Recently, we got a Kuka robot which is a 7 axis CNC machine. In order to operate it, we have to learn a brand new modeling software. It has not proved itself an easy feat. 

Triac Composites is innovative in its material use. It breaks away from many production competitors because of how their products achieve the same goals while being much lighter. The people working here are very skilled and highly capable of getting the job done efficiently. They are capable. That doesn’t mean they are in sync. The language barrier between workers and management have been the root of so many hiccups in the production process. The largest one nearly just cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars when their contractor locked in a deal with the Vietnamese government charging half the price he should have. They were discussing refurbished prices on certain products and he understood that all products were to be given a refurbished price. Triac just bought this 7 axis Kuka robot which is a huge gain in the production time. I can not express enough how much of a game changer this is. Once this robot is fully operational, production will increase tenfold and there is no telling how greatly that might affect future contracts with satisfied customers. The company is threatened by the fact that it is barely making it by financially. They are currently in a threshold position where they have to reinvest into themselves to find a way to become significantly more profitable or it will see imminent doom.

A great moment in my Ho Chi Minh City experience was when a number of us attended an American Chamber of Commerce networking event. It must have been an incredible experience for the business students, but it was an incredible waste of time for the engineers. No engineering company showed up. While there, with nothing to do but pay for overpriced drinks, we were solicited by a woman to party in her penthouse with her and her friends. A quite obvious trap. I knew she was scheming to entrap us in some scam, but boy oh boy am I a sucker for a penthouse view. We all accept the invitation and agree amongst each other to keep an eye out for anything fishy. Turns out, this incredibly wealthy man has a wife who likes to throw parties because she had a big family growing up and enjoys the company. No scheme at all. We were able to talk to him about how he built his wealth, what advice he has for us, and told him what we were doing here in Ho Chi Minh. What an evening that turned out to be.

The most challenging aspect of this internship has been learning to switch gears quickly and swiftly. We jump around from project to project, software to software, office work to factory work. You have to remember where you left off on one and bear in mind what is left to be done as you move on to a different task. For instance, while the gel-coat needs to settle on the fireboxes, we should be cutting foam for the trimaran. While the carbon tubes are being dried with thermal wraps, we should be working on the CNC for the trimaran hull cutouts. It isn’t easy moving around quickly but that’s what I enjoyed about this internship. It’s more often than not long, fast-paced days and if you’re tired, you need to find that second wind or projects will fall behind. I used to not ever drink coffee, but I developed the habit shortly after the summer began. 

I think the best feature of my internship is that it sucks. It absolutely sucks. Or at least I thought so at first. Every day waking up at the crack of dawn to hail a cab to trek to a factory to work long hours to come home to have no time left in the day to fall asleep to start over again. It’s not exactly enthralling. But this isn’t my career. This isn’t the rest of my life. This is my summer internship that I work through with very little reward, with none monetarily. The solace I find in it is that I’ve learned to keep on going. I can’t imagine the real world gets any easier. I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad I know what it means to have to keep putting forth my best effort even though it may not be what I look forward to in my day. I’ve learned if you don’t love what you do, then at least come to terms with it. You have to do what is necessary, not what is pleasant. I think this is very much a character building experience and I’m happy for it.

Although I may not be working at my dream job, I do have the opportunity to live and travel around Vietnam all while learning what it means to truly work. Having had the chance to explore, I’ve tried all sorts of foods- mostly because the menus are rarely in english so you have to point to something and hope you like it when it comes out. I think my favorite dish is one that’s made right on the side of the road, cooked on a bucket of coals, and almost never served in restaurants. It’s this rice-crepe-taco thing and I crave it nearly every day. I have no idea what’s in it and maybe I don’t want to know, but it sure is good. The best part is on occasion, a woman sets up shop right outside of Masteri and sells them a few days out of the week.

Our work projects at Triac are generally completed in pieces as the week progresses. Entire projects are doubtful to finish before our summer in Vietnam does. A Sinaporian company commissioned us for over 1,000 fireboxes of 3 different categories for one project, but now the supply of a very specific gel coat we need has run thin and the supplier can’t ship to us until the end of the week. This is a huge complication when a high bill contract is on the line. The backlog on the fireboxes has skyrocketed and until the gel coat comes in, that project can’t continue.

Then there is the trimaran- a project that I have taken a deep interest in. There is zero possibility the boat is finished by the time we leave, but I’d like to take as large of a lead I can until my short tenure expires. The budget on the boat is about $700k and has a base package that totals to $1.2M. However, the customer has extravagant dreams so the contract was finalized at $1.7M. As a kid, my family and I would frequent the seas almost every weekend and I spent the better part of a year at a sailing camp adjacent to the club at which we left our boat docked. Unfortunately, the bilge pump failed and on one grim morning we found it drowned to the bottom of the bay. With an insurance check that didn’t nearly cover the cost of a new boat, those days on the water came to an end. Working on the trimaran is exciting for me personally, because I’ve never had the opportunity to dissect an entire boat, especially one of this size and caliber of luxury. The hull of the boat can’t be completed until our Kuka robot comes in. This is a 7 axis, 23 meter CNC (in simple terms, a robotic drill)- a Ferrari of the machining world. Once that arrives, great strides will be made in the boat’s production, but for now the project progresses slowly.

Our supervisors are very mild-mannered considering the fact they oversee so many Vietnamese factory workers they can barely communicate with. If something goes wrong, a long game of charades goes underway to fix it. They all grew up as sailors, so I think when they opened Rapido (the boat company) and Triac the factory in which the boat is made, it was more or less a passion project. This is a good and bad thing. I’m almost certain they are taking a fair amount of losses every quarter. On the other hand, they believe in what they do. They work diligently and determinately and excuses are rarely tolerated. I admire that.

While in Ho Chi Minh, seeing how my supervisors work and also how the less fortunate the Vietnamese work, I’ve learned a lot about perseverance. It doesn’t matter how bad your situation is, if you have any reason to keep working then you just keep working. Something I marvel at in all honesty.

Damien, the project manager at Triac Composites and my supervisor, works relentlessly from clock in to clock out. He is constantly working on design improvement, drafting CAD models, or laboring in the factory. It is pretty common to catch him drenched in sweat while he manages and aids in the manufacturing of the boat. When the bell for break rings, he rarely pauses his work. He normally just works right through it while the rest of the factory quiets down for those 15 minutes. He has a strong work ethic while also having a fair amount of patience. He takes time to answer our questions and he doesn’t get flustered over mistakes we may make. He has guided us through a variety of ways to hurdle different modeling obstacles and he makes sure that we actually learn important lessons in the general world of engineering. I have never felt like my time was being wasted at work because Damien does a good job at keeping us busy.

            Once we walk through the doors of the factory, the workday quickly begins. After checking in with Damien, we immediately get to work on our assignments. Sometimes we’ll start with design, other days we start with manufacturing. Some days are strictly design. Some days are strictly manufacturing. The latter is always dreadful. Practical, but dreadful nevertheless. Hours upon hours of machining or fabricating whatever design was passed to us really takes its toll. Nothing sounds sweeter nor more melodic than the 5:30PM bell that signals the end of the workday. Days of strictly design aren’t exactly fun either, but working in the office has a certain level of comfort that is well above working on the factory floor.

            Beyond all there is to whine about, I have to admit that I have been given a great amount of responsibility and I do feel like I’m treated with a great level of respect at Triac Composites. We work intimately with a project that the company has allocated a lot of its resources towards. Our design assignments are to be used on their $1.7M trimaran and we have other assignments that will be used in the factory to facilitate workflow. We have played a role in the design and fabrication of the boat hull. We have designed loading gates and railings for safety and storage purposes. We have designed ramps for loading and unloading products and raw materials shipped to and from the factory. I am happy that my work at Triac is genuinely meaningful to the company and not just busy work to keep me occupied.

            With Ho Chi Minh being such a large, thriving city, I was expecting a bit of rudeness from its inhabitants. And quite frankly, I would have found the bitterness a bit fair. Interacting with so many people throughout the day can be irritating to say the least. Shockingly, everyone has generally been nice and friendly. I’m often greeted with a smile by most and thus far I haven’t felt any negativity from the local Vietnamese. A number of us visited a bar in Thao Dien and there were locals playing pool at the one billiards table. The barkeep let us put in song requests and the pool players invited us to their game. I’m just generally shocked by the hospitality across Ho Chi Minh.

Bright and early, at 7:30am every weekday morning, Garrick and I hail a driver to trek an hour eastward to our internship placement at Triac Composite. Triac originated as a boat manufacturing company, Rapido. While playing their hand at the catamaran and trimaran industry under Rapido, the company decided to evolve its direction to encompass more than boat building. Thus, Triac Composite was born. They took their lightweight composites and began molding parts for carbon mining machinery, train interiors, and architectural facades.

Upon arrival, we walked through the office doors to meet some of our company’s leadership: Damien, the project manager, and Paul, the general director. After quick introductions and showing us our desks, Damien led us out of the offices and toured us through the warehouse. The warehouse is a giant metal lunchbox that cooks in the Vietnam heat with nothing but fans and giant open doors to let it breathe. Throughout the day, about 50 Vietnamese workers complete tasks in any area they can find in the crowded factory. There are really no boundary lines where any one project section starts and finishes. The workers just operate in open spaces between laid out materials and other half-finished projects. After our stroll through the factory, Damien assigned us to view and assist in the production of the massive hub caps for carbon mining excavators. This was the start of a very long work week.

The first two days were filled with exhausting factory labor of foam cutting and carbon fiber molding that left Garrick and I panting, sore, and drenched in sweat by the day’s end. The hour and a half to two hour car ride home was a safe haven of air conditioned silence where the woes of our work drifted away with every kilometer we drove from the factory. Getting ready to dread our third day, I was immeasurably relieved when Damien told us we were going to be practicing our modeling and design skills. He sat us down and we spent the day reviewing and testing our SolidWorks and AutoCAD knowledge. We were assigned with designing a railing and gate for an unguarded staircase and loft. Because of our rustiness, those designs ended up consuming the rest of that day and a good part of what was left of the week. The final two days were a hybrid of the earlier ones. A mix of design work and manufacturing/ fabrication work. A surprising amount of our assignments were given to us without much instruction and almost no supervision. Luckily, the Vietnamese factory workers would run in at the last minute and teach us how to properly do our tasks to keep us from great injury. Although the language barrier is as thick as the sky is high, we seem to be getting along well. Not many words are exchanged, but for some reason we laugh with the workers and they laugh with us. I’m not entirely sure what I’m laughing at. I’m not entirely sure what they are laughing at. I wonder if they are as unsure as I am.

Although the travel is far, the hours are long, and the work is demanding, I’m looking forward to my internship with Triac Composite the rest of the summer. The knowledge gained from the first week was incredibly practical and will certainly be applicable in the near future. I’m expecting to gain more from this experience than I bargained for.

The first morning in Ho Chi Minh, I made it to the bus in the nick of time to go to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels are a vast network of underground tunnels that were used by the Viet Cong in their offensive against the American forces during the Vietnam War. These tunnels were incredibly narrow and difficult to navigate with only just enough crawlspace to get from one chamber to another. Impressively, they were aerated by termite mounds. Termites would create large hives on ground level and provided ventilation for the deep tunnels.  While some entrances to the tunnels were made plain and clear for the sake of tourism, others were hidden under fallen leaves with just over a square foot of opening. The tunnels were of varying levels with the bottom level allowing for escape into the river. The heat inside these tunnels was suffocating. Servicing and occupying these tunnels for 20 years would be miserable to say the least. But there was a war, and this was survival.

            The Cu Chi tunnels really opened my eyes to how ingenious and resourceful the Vietnamese can be. They are very adaptable people with a hard-driven mindset. We took a trip over to the Mekong Delta to visit the Floating markets and the hustle on the river was relentless. Every day before dawn, the Vietnamese will pack their boats with a variety of goods to be sold on the river. They would pull their boat up to ours, link the two with a hook or a rope, and begin to try to sell whatever cargo they carried. There were fruits, meats, coffees, sodas, anything that you would find from a street vendor except in bulk and from the source.

            As with any large group of Americans in a foreign country, I was expecting resentment and rejection towards our group. To my surprise, we were joyously welcomed just about anywhere we went. I am eager to see how being a member of the workforce compares to being a tourist in Vietnam. In the coming weeks, I’ll get to see the attitudes and roles within a company and experience what it is like to essentially be at the bottom of that hierarchy.