In the second week of August 2009, four months into my first job as an R&D engineer at a pulp and paper plant in Riau, I told my supervisor I was leaving to join a bank. I was 23. I had spent four years studying chemical engineering, graduated at the top of my department, and worked my way into the bleaching process team at one of the country’s largest paper producers. I had also concluded that what I wanted to do for the next four decades was sit on the other side of how risk moves through systems, and that finance was where that work lived.
My supervisor told me, more politely than I deserved, that I was making a mistake.
I am now 15 years into a risk career that has run through three banks, an insurer, and eventually my own company. In every one of those seats, the skills I have leaned on hardest were not the ones I picked up in business school or in risk certification cycles. They were the ones I learned in a chemical engineering lab in North Sumatra.
This is not a coincidence. The principles that govern how chemical plants work happen to be the same principles that govern how financial systems work. The finance industry, by and large, has not noticed.
What I did not know I was learning
The chemical engineering curriculum I went through at Universitas Sumatera Utara was, on the surface, about reactors, separation processes, mass transfer, and process control. What it actually trained was a way of seeing systems.
The discipline forces you to think in terms of inputs, outputs, transformations, and constraints. Nothing inside a chemical process is allowed to be vague. If you do not know where a stream goes, you do not understand the plant. If you cannot predict how the system will behave when one variable changes, you cannot operate it safely. The mental habit this builds, the refusal to leave any part of a system unaccounted for, turns out to be the same habit you need to run a risk function inside a bank.
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Three principles that transferred
Three things in particular have stayed with me, and have shaped every risk decision I have made since.
Mass balance. In a chemical process, every kilogram of material in must equal every kilogram out, less what is accumulated or transformed inside the system. There are no unexplained gaps. The reflex this builds, that an unbalanced ledger is a mis-measurement, not a mystery, is the same reflex that catches operational losses, fraud patterns, and capital gaps inside a bank. A risk officer who instinctively believes that what comes out of a system must equal what went in, less what was retained, asks the right questions almost without thinking.
Process control and feedback. In a well-designed chemical process, the system measures itself continuously and adjusts in real time. The temperature drifts above the setpoint, a valve closes. The pressure spikes, a relief opens. There is no quarterly review committee. The system corrects, or it ruptures. This way of thinking about feedback, small adjustments made continuously against a known boundary, is exactly what most financial risk frameworks still do not do. They review periodically. They escalate sporadically. They operate, in engineering terms, like a reactor with no instrumentation.
Failure mode and effects analysis. Before any chemical plant goes live, the engineering team systematically maps every way the process can fail, ranks the failure modes by likelihood and consequence, and designs the controls before the failure happens. The discipline of asking “what would have to be true for this to go badly?”, not as anxiety, but as method, is the single most useful habit I brought into risk management. Most of the loss events I have seen across two decades were predictable inside a competent failure analysis. Most of them did not have one.
Where the finance training falls short
Finance has its own analytical apparatus. Modigliani-Miller, Black-Scholes, value-at-risk, the architecture of modern asset pricing. These are powerful tools inside the assumptions they were built for. Outside those assumptions, they are quieter than their reputations suggest.
The gap I have noticed, across many years of working with both engineers who entered finance and finance professionals who stayed in finance, is this. The engineer asks first: what could break this system, and what would be true if it did? The finance professional asks first: what is the expected outcome, and what is the variance around it? Both questions matter. But in a crisis, and risk management is the discipline of crises, the engineer’s question is the one that saves the institution.
What this means for anyone choosing a non-traditional path
I get asked, perhaps once a month, by an engineering student whether they should leave technical work for finance, strategy, or consulting. My answer has become consistent.
The pivot is not the question. The skills you have built in engineering are some of the most transferable skills any discipline produces. You can move into finance, and your engineering training will quietly do half the work of your new role. The question is whether you are leaving for the right reason, because the systems you want to understand are now financial systems, not chemical ones, or because you think the new field will be more glamorous than the one you trained in.
If it is the first reason, the move is sound. If it is the second, no field will deliver what you are hoping for.
I do not draw flowsheets on whiteboards. I do not solve heat transfer equations. But the way I think about risk, about systems, balances, feedbacks, failures, was shaped by four years at USU and four months in Riau before I ever opened a banking textbook. 15 years later, that training is still doing more of the work than anything I learned afterwards.
The most useful risk management education I have ever received was a chemical engineering degree. It just took me a decade to fully realise it.
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