My Petroleum Past

How did it begin?

Since I was a child, I always had a thing for math and science. By the time college applications came around, it felt natural that I would study engineering. Growing up in Houston, TX I was surrounded by the oil and gas industry. The concept of energy and how it powered society fascinated me. Because of this, I applied to the Petroleum Engineering program at The University of Texas at Austin. Here I learned the ins and outs of the energy industry and exactly what went into drilling and producing this “liquid gold.”

As I approached graduation, I had been working part time as a lab assistant for one of my professors. After a deep conversation with him, he convinced me to stick around for my Master’s degree in Petroleum Engineering. As a graduate student, I was a Teacher’s Assistant (TA) for the Reservoir Engineering course and performed research experiments for chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Simply put, this is the process of injecting surfactants (like soap) and polymers into oil reservoirs to squeeze out the last bits of oil left behind long after most of the original oil in a reservoir has been produced. Here’s a simple diagram to show how it works:

Find out more about the research I performed by downloading my Thesis below!

What changed?

One of my most commonly asked questions in regards to my career is “Why did I pivot out of petroleum engineering?”

After graduating from my Master’s program in 2020, the energy industry was in rough conditions. Due to COVID, demand for oil and gas sank and oil prices collapsed. This caused most companies in the industry to have large layoffs and hiring was put on hold. Job postings for petroleum engineering positions were scarce and outlook was grim.

However, near the end of my graduate school, I began taking a python bootcamp for data science and machine learning online. This had started to peak my interest in working with data.