[No. 115] Yuta Ozaki

During offshore platform commissioning

Five years have already passed since graduation, and I am currently on assignment at an affiliated subsidiary in Thailand. Since high school, I had a vague desire to work abroad in the future, but at the time, I never imagined I would be working overseas so soon. It all began during my student years when I encountered the field of chemical engineering.

I spent my junior high and high school years in California, USA, due to my father's job transfer. Having been immersed in an English-speaking environment for about seven years, I had no resistance to the language by the time I was in high school. Amidst this, during my final year of high school, the time came to decide on my future path.

At first, I considered attending a university in the United States. However, one day, when I was talking about my future with a local friend, they said something like, "What are you doing for college? Aren't you going back to Japan? Japan is great. The anime is interesting, the food is delicious, the cars are cool..." I still remember how, for some reason, I felt incredibly happy to be Japanese at that moment. After thinking it over, I made the decision to go to a university in Japan, with the intention of one day returning to the global stage as a Japanese person in a different capacity.

At university, I applied for Admission Category 3. The reason was my strong desire to work in a job involving "monozukuri" (manufacturing) in the future, and I strongly associated monozukuri with chemistry. Therefore, I actively took classes related to materials and synthesis. However, in my third year of university, I became interested in a class from a completely different field. This was my encounter with chemical engineering.

Chemical engineering is relatively more engineering-oriented within applied chemistry, and it felt like a different discipline from the chemistry classes I had taken so far. Instead of focusing on the creation of substances, it scientifically examines the processes and efficiency leading to their formation. It involves considering the unit operations (equipment) necessary to produce these substances and designing each piece of equipment. I was increasingly drawn to the vast scope of this field. When choosing a laboratory, I visited the Reaction Engineering (Chemical Engineering) Laboratory and, considering the atmosphere created by Professor Terasaka and the senior students, I submitted my preference without hesitation.

My days in the laboratory were invaluable to me. For my research, I developed my own equipment and used it to tackle research topics with actual market needs. This custom-built equipment was, in other words, a small-scale plant itself. This is when my life in plant engineering began. Many of my senior colleagues from the lab also went on to careers in plant engineering, and I had the opportunity to hear many of their passionate stories while I was in the lab and during my job search. They spoke of clearing densely wooded sites to create camps, staying on-site to build large plants where there was nothing before, and then, when production began after performance tests, shedding tears of relief as all their hard work paid off. Every time I heard such stories, I felt a strong desire to do that kind of work in the future. Besides research, I have countless other memories that I can't write down here, such as traveling with senior and junior students, forming a band with lab members to perform at the Yagami Festival, and practicing softball between research sessions. After an enjoyable life in the laboratory, I received a job offer from my current company, which handles plant engineering both domestically and internationally.

In the spring of my third year with the company, I was suddenly ordered to be transferred to an affiliated subsidiary in Thailand. I am still working at that company. Our company is a contractor that handles everything from the design to the commissioning of plants (offshore platforms) for extracting offshore natural gas and crude oil, with clients being state-owned and private gas and oil companies. I currently belong to the design department, which alone has a total of 300 people. We have a diverse group of engineers of various nationalities, including Thai, Indian, Filipino, Indonesian, and Myanmarese. As one of the few Japanese staff, I am involved not only in plant design but also sometimes stationed at offshore sites for commissioning support. Previously, I lived on a vessel for a total of about five months for the commissioning of a plant delivered to the Andaman Sea off the coast of Myanmar. It was the moment when my vague student-day dream of "wanting to be involved in a job where I could be active overseas" became a reality.

To all the students, I believe you enter university with various thoughts and feelings. They may be vague, but everyone is in the same boat. You never know what might be the trigger, but I believe that by meeting different people and having various experiences at university, you will eventually find what you want to do and the path you should take. I had a very enjoyable student life. During that time, I also found what I wanted to do, and now I am working as an engineer on the global stage, which was my long-held dream.

I believe university is a place to find what you want to do while enjoying yourself. Once you graduate from university, you can't go back to being a student. Whether you like it or not, you become a working adult. Therefore, I hope you will make your time at university meaningful. I am truly glad that I entered Keio University.