Have unions "ruined" this industry yet?
The average salary for spring graduates in petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University was $87,743 a year. The maximum salary offered was $113,000 a year.
BTTT
I managed to get onto a Production Platform for Mobil Oil for two summers, and that pretty much paid my way thru college. However, by the time I graduated in 1985, I was lucky to get a clean-painter job on a drilling rig. In 1986, I got laid off from that and haven't been in the oilfield since.
Now, if some oil company is willing to hire an old, broken-down Highway/Geotechnical Engineer for $87,000-$113,000, I'll be more than willing to re-locate. {8^D
Point is, the Petroleum Engineering is more subject to the whims of economics and politics than other Technical fields. A prospective Petroleum Engineering student entering college needs to have a passion for the Oil Patch, and is willing to stick it out during the dry times as well.
And for those not interested in a college degree or a desk job...
Texas oil boom fueling trucker bonuses propels Odessa
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/08/06/texas-oil-boom-fueling-trucker-bonuses-propels-odessa/
Truckers can get $5,000 signing bonuses from companies serving Odessa, the West Texas center of a new Lone Star State oil boom and the nation’s fastest-growing city.
Housing is so tight that the local school district put deposits down on 15 apartments, to ensure that new teachers moving to the area would have places to live.
Union Pacific Corp. (UNP) is adding tracks and railyard facilities to help trains handle flows of drilling supplies coming in and crude oil heading out. The rising prosperity, driven by new extraction technologies and hydraulic fracturing, has unleashed an economic surge that is transforming Texas’s “petroplex” of Odessa and nearby Midland.
And in the “I Don’t Want to Have a Future” catagory are all the students who foolishly major in Journalism or Communication (TV). Newspapers are as antiquated as the teletype. There are only a few hundred TV stations in the country, and only a tiny number hire new anchors each year. (Elderly anchors can stay until their plastic surgeons retire, and if you are White, you are not in the diversity game.)
Yet universities across the land are happy to take thousands of parents’ savings to train their starry-eyed youth for these imaginary jobs. In a just world, this would be investigated as fraud
My grand-daughter graduated 3 yrs. ago w/ a Mech. Engineering degree.
She was typical lib, refusing to apply with Shell Oil that at the time was crying for workers in W. Co.
She spent the next 2 yrs. in a daycare center. Saw the light.
Got a job, finally, designing and modelling oil pipelines.
She loves it. I’m real proud of her.
Let’s get fracking!
Ping for later.