I’m interested in this field and was wondering if anyone could give their own experiences and knowledge about the major as i’m deciding on undergrad.
In terms of school, I didn’t find the degree difficult at all. It felt more like a “team work and time management” degree. And in that sense, it did a pretty good job preparing me for the workforce.
I really like the job as it offers a seemingly unlimited amount of challenges. We apply equations to situations that don’t really work and we don’t know any of the variables. The job feels like 40% economics, 40% statistics and 20% engineering. The job very much has a project management feel to it. Within a year or two of graduation (sometimes immediately) you might have 100 wells as a production engineer or your own rig as a drilling engineer. That’s not to say you will have people working for you, but you are the guy in charge of those wells/rigs. You are writing the procedures to tell the operators what to do.
There are four primary disciplines of petroleum engineering (painting with a broad brush) so here might be something each one would do:
Drilling: Self explanatory, a well needs to be drilled so you are going to write the procedure on how to drill the well and get it ready for completions (casing, liner etc.)
Completions: A well needs to be completed (fracked) so the completion engineer with design the procedure (sand, water, # of stages etc.)
Production: The well is about to be turned on. How can we get the oil out? ESP? Pumping Unit?
Reservoir: We need to drill another well, where is the best location to drill a well? What will our rate of return be on that well?
My advice to anyone getting a degree in petroleum engineering (actually any engineering):
Take a statistics class (confidence intervals, regression, descriptive statistics)
Take an engineering econ class (NPV, ROR, etc.)
Take an actual programming class (C++, Java etc.)