Indigo Spotlight on Project Engineer, May Yupar Myint
Employee Spotlight: May Yupar Myint (Boma)
Position: Project Engineer
Three words to best describe you: Enthusiastic, Curious, Adventurous
Motto or personal mantra: A good tree can lodge ten thousand birds. (Try to be better so that others can depend on you.)
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?: In the next 5 years, I see myself as a more supportive daughter to my mother, a technically proficient engineer who is more brilliant in the solar field than before.
True leadership means to you: Cooperating and going hand in hand if something happens, not oppressing from one to another.
The funniest or smartest person in the room? Why?: The funniest! It is good to make people laugh and people will be more likely to be productive in a happy working environment.
Can’t live without: Mom
Three words to describe Indigo Energy: Open, Improving, and Welcome (own ideas)
The most unique part about working at Indigo Energy: Saying "Happy Birthday" to each other if we face new challenges or have new experiences to learn.
Favorite part of being a member of Indigo Energy: Being under good leadership, a caring, and supportive working environment.
Definition of your success at Indigo Energy: I define my ability to do project management independently as my success at Indigo Energy. At the start of my junior engineering life, I did not know much and made mistakes such as not considering a walkway in designing the solar panel layouts. But after getting solar experiences and on-the-job training, I can now handle solar EPC projects from start to finish. This is a significant accomplishment.
The most challenging at Indigo Energy: Indigo Energy (Indigo 3.0) offers solar engineering services to clients worldwide and when doing the permit-ready plan sets solar services for the US clients, I need to read and comply with the US National Electrical Code (NEC). The initial time of experiencing NEC was not easy for a Burmese engineer. During my spare time, I studied and read all of the solar-related codes of the NEC till I could remember the content with the page number. Now, our Indigo Energy technical team has been delivering high-quality solar engineering services worldwide.
12. Challenges of working as a woman Project Engineer in Myanmar solar industry: Stereotypes that the electrical career is not for women have usually been in Myanmar society apparently and unconsciously. I have made over 100 site visits to different places in my junior life, including factories, offices, and industrial zones. At that time, the electrical team members of most of the factories were mostly men, and I was asked and speculated, “Are you sure that you can climb the roof?”, “Can you really carry solar panels?”, “How can a girl know electricity-related stuff well?”. There is even a case where I need to put more effort to accept my explanation on their wrongly known fact. So, there had usually been a trust issue and suspecting my capability based on my gender. I overcome it by just focusing on the work I have to do. My skills and result-oriented capability can finally make them realize and accept my explanation and prove to some extent that women are not subordinate to men not only in electrical careers but also in normal lives.
13. How has Indigo Energy helped you in your career development?: When I first entered into Indigo Energy as a junior engineer, the tasks that I could do as an engineer were limited. I could only draw and design solar panel layouts, do site visits and pre-feasibility studies. Then, I grew gradually in my professional career, and now, I can even review the junior’s hand drawings and evaluate whether a design is right or wrong. I could create the template related to a pre-feasibility study by myself, could systematically draw a project schedule that was really effective for the EPC installation process timeline.
In the solar EPC installation process, I looked at what the site engineers do but also involved and cooperated with them during the installation. I think that I need to know how to do the installation process so that I can manage it well. Then, Indigo Energy allowed me to do the solar EPC project management. According to my experience, now, I could tell how many hours should take long for a specific work, whether the doing things are right or wrong. For example, I know what the wiring should look like in reality since I have seen the design in the document and have hands-on experience.
It is apparent that my skills and professionalism during the onboarding process in Indigo Energy are really different . 5 years at Indigo Energy is the key to my career development, and Indigo Energy has helped me a lot in my professional career growth.
