Any progressing college student, particularly those studying science or engineering, will define success as the semester just completed. The semester ahead is the next big hurdle between him or her and that big job. Each step along the way is a good reason to party!
The folks at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Houston, apparently remember the feeling. They hosted a dinner cruise for over 550 petroleum engineering college students who were attending the Society of Petroleum Engineers' annual technical conference this month in New Orleans.
The vibrant gathering of budding petroleum engineers, on the Missis sippi River aboard the Paddlewheeler Creole Queen, represented at least 19 universities in the US and abroad.
Many students represented the larger petroleum engineering departments, such as Texas A&M University in College Station, Tex., and the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo.
Students also represented smaller petroleum engineering departments, such as the one at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. KU Prof. Shapour Vossoughi said his university offers a petroleum engineering degree through the university's chemical engineering department. He said, in the past few years, the school has graduated a few petroleum engineers each year and that enrollment in the program has increased lately.
Cole Corley, Mathew LaPierre, and Bill Kent, students at Montana Tech of the University of Montana in Butte said their petroleum engineering department has a total enrollment of about 180 students and that the freshman class is currently the largest.
Students from universities abroad came from Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil and University of Leoben in Austria.
Summer jobs
The students were upbeat about job prospects. Corley, a sophomore at Montana Tech, said, "This year I've had four job interviews for summer intern positions, and I'm hopeful that one will come through."
Bill Kent, a junior at Montana Tech, said, "I worked for Anadarko in the Bossier play last summer in Buffalo, Tex., which is about halfway between Dallas and Houston. It was an incredible learning experience!"
Kent said, "I was in production doing frac jobs, completions, and workovers. The biggest frac job was 400,000 lb [of proppant] and we pumped it at 100 bbl/min [injection rate]. It was a neat experience, because we had so many frac jobs going on. I was able to sit in on 11 or 12 of them during the summer."
"It was really good, helping me to learn frac techniques and the theory behind fracturing in general. When you get out to the field and experience it hands-on, you grasp the concept much better than sitting in a classroom," he said.
When asked about possible careers after graduation, Corley said he wants to work offshore as a drilling engineer. Kent said he wants to work onshore, more on the production side.
Micah Pingley and Joshua Jackson, juniors at West Virginia University, Mor gantown, said their goal after graduating is to work somewhere up north in the snow and cold. Pingley said he had returned to college to get his degree after being out of school for 3 years, saying he'd be better off having a degree.
Long-term commitment
Anadarko said, "Supporting SPE student programs and petroleum en gineering departments is crucial to Anadarko's recruiting efforts, now and in the future. Anadarko has re cruited graduating petroleum en- gine ering students every year since 1977."
Morris Helbach, Anadarko vice-president and chief information officer, said that universities have given them feedback on how important it is for the industry to hire graduates reliably year-after-year, keeping their engineering departments active and attempting to even out the cycles of the industry.
"We absolutely depend on new graduates to complete our growing workforce," said Mike Bridges, chief engineer at Anadarko. "The students we hire from our recruiting schools are top graduates who come to us with skills that we can use immediately."
Befitting the occasion, fantastic weather and the most magnificent shooting star, seemingly just across the bow of the riverboat, graced the New Orleans skyline.