From Calcutta to Antarctica - Arghya Sen’s unique journey to CIM Enviro

March 13, 2019

An enthusiastic professional chess player with musical talent for the synthesizer, when asked what super power he would like to have, Arghya Sen humbly wishes for a better memory. An eidetic memory, to be precise.

‘With the technology helping us now, we don’t need to remember anything’, he says.

Arghya has been a Senior Systems Engineer at CIM Enviro for 8 months, and describes his primary role as being a ‘mentor or coach, leading the junior engineers within the business.’

It’s also his responsibility to maintain communication with CIM Enviro’s clients, making sure that everything is ‘as per the expectations, understanding what added value CIM Enviro can give to our customers, apart from just the standard service we provide.’

It is not only the concepts of the ACE Platform and BMS engineering, that Arghya educates junior engineers on. He also instills the company values.

‘Integrity is one of those soft skills,’ he explains, ‘and the other is sticking to your commitments.’

He also believes that while being versatile is good, he recommends that his junior engineers should become a master of one thing first. Arghya is a master Controls Engineer. Rightly so, with six years of industry experience coming from Johnson controls and an ability to navigate an industry that may not be as dynamic as other software industries.

‘The key challenge is to continue learning because… you’ve got to keep up with the market and technology that’s coming ahead. And you never know what to expect in the next few years. You know?’

We do know. While Building Management Systems (BMS) are not new, they have definitely evolved and become smarter in the last 50 years. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart buildings and cloud based services can be attributed to the massive developments in the BMS and building automation industry.

The need for energy efficiency is a key factor in the expansive growth of the BMS industry. Arghya agrees that energy is extremely valuable.

‘Every penny of energy you save is priceless,’ he says of CIM Enviro’s impact on the world. ‘It’s a global impact. You look at it now and think oh, it’s just a few sites across Australia. But when CIM spreads globally it will have a significant impact.’

‘It's not only about the money that the customers save, it's ... the energy costs that come down. And then you start looking into other renewable sources of energy and all sorts of things that you could do with your energy… which will always benefit the environment.’

Arghya’s vision for CIM Enviro - much like the rest of the team - is global expansion.

‘Down the line, what would be really nice is to go and scale up globally and what would be the challenge for us and the product as a whole is how we scale when we grow global.’

Arghya’s move from multinational conglomerate Johnson Controls to Australia-based CIM Enviro was not in his original life plan. Arghya was one of three graduate students, out of 600, chosen by Johnson Controls campus recruiters.

‘Leading into Johnson Controls it was a good challenge to begin with because it's a massive company where you have thousands of people globally. And to shine amongst so many people it's another challenge... But you get lost in the hierarchy of the corporates.’

Fully expecting to start in a graduate role and work up the ranks at Johnson Controls, Arghya is now glad he took a different path that led him to CIM Enviro.

‘To come and join a company like CIM Enviro where you have the freedom of doing what you want to do and working with such a great bunch of people where they have all been experts in their own field, there’s not better way to learn. Where you have all the experts in one place and you’re developing something together - it’s just fantastic.’

Arghya says that the learning opportunity CIM Enviro afforded him was something he really wanted out of his workplace.

Speaking of learning opportunities, Arghya has been lucky enough to experience something very few others will be able to say they have. Having grown up in Calcutta, he experienced a ‘dramatically different’ landscape to when he spent 16 months in Antarctica, at the young age of 23.

‘The fun part of it’ Arghya says,’was that nobody really wanted to  .’

What he describes as a ‘booster’ for his career and a life-changing event, Arghya worked on a base camp that was under construction by the Indian Government’s National Center for Antarctic and Ocean Research. Part of the service and maintenance team, Arghya spent the entire Antarctic winter period running daily maintenance and operations.

He describes the experience as eye-opening for a ‘uni guy’ to the real world, where he began to understand all the difficulties that one may go through in their life.

‘It helps you to understand what you want from your life - what your expectations are - and it helps you get a clear vision because you spend so much time thinking about stuff. You learn to spend time with yourself.’

When asked for his photographs from Antarctica, CIM Enviro were pleasantly surprised to see that we have a photographer amongst our team.

To see more of Arghya's photographs from Antarctica, click here.

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CIM Team
March 13, 2019
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