I was attached to Camp Dresser & McKee, Inc., an environmental consultancy firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Officially, I was placed in the Environmental Management Division, which provides hazardous waste management services, but I also had the opportunity to work for CDM International, the division of CDM that has its headquarters in Cambridge and several offices world-wide.

Throughout the six months, I learnt about a business that not many people in this part of the world are familiar with: hazardous waste management.  In a nutshell, a typical job goes like this:-

· identification of site of contamination
· award of job of cleaning up contaminated site
· evaluation of extent of contamination
· task of cleaning contamination

Unfortunately, things are not quite that simple.  An integral part of the job is client relations and that is probably the most challenging part of any project.

Perhaps the most interesting work would have been on-site observing remediation work, but because I did not have the 40-hour Health and Safety Training that is required of all CDM engineers on site, I was not able to go.  However, I was able to go on a particular site visit that did not require any special training and that was to determine the scope of work on an underground storage tank project.  This site was within the walls of a State Correction Facility, i.e. a prison!  There were quite a few security measures that we had to go through, but it was a real eye-opener to be able to walk through corridors with cells on both sides.

But work was only part of my life there.  Living alone in an apartment in the city, I had to quickly adapt to the American way of life - taking my trash out only on certain days of the week, doing my laundry at the laundry across the street, paying my own bills …

The few things that formed my first impression of America were the open friendliness of the people I met and the informal atmosphere at work.  Everyone greeted each other with "Hi, how are you?"  Initially that really threw me off guard, "Why do they keep asking me how I am when they’ve just met me?"  Just as I was ready to begin on an entire story of how my day was, I realised it was just a greeting and nothing more.  There were a million other little phrases and mannerisms I had to get used to along the way.

Everyone was on a first-name basis with almost everyone else.  At first, I felt a little rude calling the more senior staff by their names, even after they insisted I do that.  But after I realised they felt uncomfortable when I called them Mr. or Ms. So and so, I quickly switched.

The weather!  That was always a great conversation topic.  Catching daily weather reports was essential because one had to plan one’s entire day around them.  It could be 5degree Celsius one day, 15degree Celsius the next; then a couple of days later, it would plunge to below zero.  But the cold was a welcome change to the heat and humidity in Singapore, although a lot of native Bostonians wouldn’t agree!

A lot of my experiences I wouldn’t be able to put down on paper, only because they’re too abstract.  All the time I was there, I felt I was different from the people around me, but never out of place.  I immersed myself into the culture and way of life there,  without forgetting what it is like here, figuring out what was different, and wondering why.  There were things I liked about the American way of life and other things I preferred about life here.  That, I think, is the whole point of spending time in another part of the world.  Not just to go there and point out all the things that you found different and disagreeable, but to acknowledge the fact that different cultures and societies exist, and that your "right’ way of doing things might not be someone else’s.

If you’re wondering whether you should spend your time away from home, away from the comforts of home, I’d say, "Go for it!".  At the risk of sounding cliched, the past half a year has really made a difference to the way I think, in the way I want to approach life, and it has also definitely helped me understand myself as a person, and as a part of the culture here.  Everyone’s overseas experience will be different, and I’m glad to say I made the most of mine.