After his final-year project at the Couach shipyard in Gironde, Romain went to China to manage a Sinopacific shipyard in Yangzhou, 350km west of Shanghai.
Step-by-step shipbuilding
I was working in the technical department of SETAF SAGET, a French merchant marine company with a fleet of cargo ships and oil tankers. My work focused on supervising bulk carrier projects (ships transporting sand or grain, for example) for foreign ship owners.
To simplify, I had to make sure that the ship's condition was better than it would have been without this kind of close supervision.
In practice, this meant assigning structural, painting and mechanical crews to control the construction process every step of the way. I got more involved near the end of the project, when the ship was being assembled in dry dock, and then I supervised the launch, sea trials and final preparations before delivery to the client.
At the heart of the shipyard
The technical aspect of my work took place on board ship, where I looked for any manufacturing defects so they could be fixed on site. My other role was to update a set of computer files detailing all the data collected for each ship under construction.
I also had a lot of meetings with the shipyard's design and quality control departments.
This four-month position was beneficial to Romain both personally and professionally. Today, he's working in the oil-related sector on the KAOMBO project run by Technip for the Ausy group.
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