Email: Going into oil from engineering

Sean,

 

As someone who’s done quite a bit on the education side of engineering, the most important thing the person who wrote you needs to do is get internships at oil/mineral companies while he’s in college. This means he needs to go to engineering school in a state with a significant mineral extraction industry. Texas A&M has a petroleum engineering program, and University of Kentucky has a mining engineering. I’m sure universities in Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma would be a good fit, too.

 

But the most important thing is a college’s internship program. Internships are where you pick up specialized skills, make contacts, and set your career on a particular trajectory. So he wants to make sure the engineering school he goes to has relationships with Exxon, Halliburton, Koch, Abraxas, etc. Any decent program will be able to tell you what companies it works with to provide interns.

What they’re doing now is specialized education. The oil industry has set up various programs where they train directly. Usually, that leads to A&M’s petroleum engineering program or something else. He asked what classes was being taken that in a couple of years that someone could get a starting wage for $100,000. The answer is that the classes are all highly specialized classes the oil industry established. Drilling into the crust of the Earth is not a course offered at most colleges. Most of these specialized classes are in areas of oil production where they train and hire local people.

Check out this story. The industry is trying to figure out how to replace its retiring workforce. They need skilled labor, not lost souls. The skills are engineering related. I asked myself, “The oil industry used to have the recruits before. Where did they go? What has changed as opposed to twenty to thirty years ago? Where are all the technically minded people going?”

They are going into Computer Science! So they can ‘make their own video game’!

I’m very happy with this. The sucking of talent into Computer Science fields (where they get to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’) has made it for me like walking through empty rooms. And wages keep going up because the workforce keeps shrinking. Meanwhile, there are too many people trying to ‘make video games’ so they get paid less and keep working more hours (and are easily disposable since every kid wants to ‘make their own game’). Meanwhile, to youngsters oil is ‘bad’ and ‘scary’ so they run away while leaving old Malstrom to make millions they could have obtained. It’s fine by me! I hope they continue!

Since civilization depends on the energy industry, the workforce crunch seriously threatens the energy industry. And since most of this crunch is due to the ‘Bronies’ going into Computer Science because they feel they ‘have a video game inside them’, one can accurately say: “Hardcore gamers threaten civilization itself!” It is one of the many reasons why the hardcore must be destroyed!