September 24, 2016
The following post is part four of a seven-part series where JSG grad students reveal what they were up to over summer break. Enjoy!
As graduation approaches and the realization sets in that, yes, I need to find a job, I am brought back to the age-old question: industry or academia? To test the waters, this summer I am working as an intern at Shell’s office in downtown New Orleans. Here I am, plunged into a new city where plastic beads hang from the trees and every house looks like a colonial mansion. A city further south than I have ever lived, where the food is hot and the weather hotter. A place where, despite the triple digit temperatures and 90% humidity, there is the perpetual company refrain of “at least we’re not in Houston.” But I digress.
What’s it like at Shell? Actually, it’s pretty great. I spent my first week learning about the team, the project, the history, and everything I would need for my summer task, all through half-hour chats with busy teammates who put aside their work to talk to me. Then whoosh, off to Houston for a gathering of interns and two weeks of collaboration with people in the main office teaching me how to extract meaning from tiny piles of drill cuttings and even tinier slabs of thin sections. In my thesis work I study large outcrops of sandstones in remote places in the field, so learning how to apply the same logic and training to much smaller samples taken from a single well has been a challenge.
As a rule, I ask many questions, and whether I am asking a senior geologist, or a petrographer in the next cubical over, again and again my questions have been met with incredibly friendly and approachable people always willing to drop everything to lend a hand.
Even when I broke their microscope.
So academia or industry? It’s hard to say where I’ll end up, but at least now I know that a career in industry would be a fun and interesting option.
