You have to create your own path: a conversation with Namrata Baruah

The way most engineers move through their careers is to get good at the job in front of them. Namrata, project engineer at OMRT, did that for the first two years. Then she started asking a different question, and it took her somewhere most engineering paths do not lead.

We sat down with her to talk about how she got from there to here, and what it took to make the moves no one had assigned to her.

A working principle from before OMRT

Namrata trained as an architect in India and spent two years at an architectural startup before deciding the work was not where she wanted to stay. The work was good. The hours were not.

"In India, you say yes to a lot of things. It is partly about pulling in clients, partly about pride in the quality. But it can mean staying up nights in a row to deliver something you should have planned differently in the first place."

She started exploring parametric design inside the office because the standard architecture work was not where she wanted to stay. There was no real use case for it where she was. So she looked at master's programmes that taught computational design, found that there were not many, applied to TU Delft, and got in. She moved to the Netherlands during peak Covid, which meant her first year of the master's was online and her cohort only met properly in year two.

When she joined OMRT in November 2022, the thing she carried with her was the bias toward quality. The thing she actively dropped was the assumption that quality required burning the team out to get it. That balance turned out to matter more than she expected.

"You can be very direct here. Not rude, just clear. We can deliver really good stuff, and more is not possible. That is accepted. It is respected."

The moves that were not on the org chart

The arc of Namrata's three and a half years at OMRT looks tidy in retrospect: project engineer, subject matter expert, process work. None of those steps were given to her. Each one she asked for.

The first move was the wind analysis work. After a senior colleague left and took a lot of institutional knowledge with him, the studio had a gap. Namrata teamed up with another engineer and ran boot camps with a colleague to rebuild the depth.

"That was a moment. A lot of how we did wind lived only in his head. We had to figure out how to keep that capability in the studio, not in any one person."

The second move was harder to describe and easier to skip. When a colleague started looking at standardising studio processes, Namrata asked if she could help. Not because she had been told to. Because it was where her curiosity was pointing.

"There was no defined path for it. I had to make one. The thing I have learned is that if there is no obvious place to grow, you find what you are interested in and you start helping someone with it. Even if it is just a little bit, like an internship inside your own job."

That conversation became Lean Six Sigma training. Yellow belt last year, orange belt this month, green and black to come.

What that looked like in practice

The pattern Namrata followed is recognisable once you see it. It is also small enough to copy.

She noticed something she was drawn to. She did a little research to see whether it was real, not just shiny. She walked over and asked someone already adjacent to it whether she could help. She started with the smallest possible piece. She showed up consistently. She found the structured version of the training afterwards, not before.

"Sometimes you look for direction from inside the office. A path that is already defined for you to grow into. My mindset shifted: there is no path, but I still want to grow. The best thing you can do is find that 'something,' even if it is small."

The version of this that does not work is waiting for someone to draw the path for you. Instead, treat your own next step as something you build, one small ask at a time.

Lean Six Sigma in a parametric design studio

While Lean Six Sigma is often associated with industrial manufacturing, applying it to a creative computational studio sounds like a mismatch.

In practice, it is not. The core principles focus on eliminating unnecessary actions and minimising inconsistencies in routine tasks. Such an approach is directly applicable to the operations of the studio.

"Every time a project moves through the studio, there are steps we do over and over. If those steps are not defined, every engineer has to figure them out from scratch. That is energy spent on the wrong thing."

The first thing Namrata did was write the studio's standard operating procedures down. Not the parametric work itself, which is bespoke per project, but the wrap-around: how a project comes in, who communicates what at which point, which documents need to be updated, where information lives. She turned the steps into a BPMN diagram, a business process model that maps responsibilities and decision points cleanly.

"All of that knowledge existed before. It was just very cerebral. People had it because they had lived it. Anyone joining new had to absorb it by being there long enough."

The diagram is now in Oracle as a standard process. The next stage is moving it into Odoo so it actually drives the work, rather than describing it.

What is next

The thing Namrata is working on now is feedback. It is, in her view, the studio's biggest unsolved problem.

"We get feedback, but it goes somewhere and people are not sure if it lands. That kills motivation. If you do not know your feedback is useful, you stop giving it."

She is drawing the diagram first and prototyping it inside Odoo to see what works. Once that is in place, she has her sights on the bridge between studio processes and the wider company. OMRT's verticals were announced at the last all-hands. The studio sits inside that structure, and a lot of what makes the studio work or not work depends on how cleanly information flows between it and the rest of the business.

"We do not work in isolation. Information comes in from every side. If you want the studio to run smoothly, you have to look at the level above as well."

The line worth holding onto

Namrata's path is unusual because she made it. The principle behind that is straightforward enough to be useful for anyone else at OMRT looking for their own next move.

"Just being curious about something, that is where it starts. Not knowing exactly how to get there. Having a loose framework of where you are now and where you want to go. Then taking one step at a time. All experience is good experience, because you learn something new every time."

She is also blunt about the alternative.

"While most individuals are in their roles because they enjoy the work, it is important to recognise that a vast world of opportunity exists beyond those current boundaries."

That is what driving your own growth at OMRT looks like. Not heroics. Just curiosity, a small first ask, and the willingness to do the next thing on your own initiative.