<p>I have a non-PE background and would like to pursue a Masters in Petroleum engineering at New Mexico Tech or U. of Louisiana at Lafayette. I got admitted to both...</p>
<p>Which school do you think is better in terms of</p>
<p>a) being recruited straight out of school</p>
<p>b) the quality of the training</p>
<p>I am looking for a place that will give me a good shot at internships and of course a job right out of school. Please help .... Still waiting to hear from LSU...</p>
<p>You will have to make that decision based on your financial obligations and whether or not you want to be close to home. I don’t know much about NMtech, but Ull is heavily recrutied by schlumberger. They give many donations to that schools program. It is also recruited by the major corps. Visit both areas and make your decision.</p>
<p>First of all, call it UL, cuz they will get ragin’ cajin’ on your ass all the way back up to Canada, and let the Quebecs take care of 'ya! Lol those french people are crazy! They’re kinda like camels; they will spit on you, but hey it will prepare you for the deserts when you career starts, “if you work for Saudi Aramco.” I think they provide you with your own camel…</p>
<p>…Anyway, they hate LSU, 'cuz they’re overshadowed by Les Mile’s new spread offense. Now between LSU and UL it’s tough. I finally raised my ACT up enough so I could get into LSU with their new standards, and I’m probably going to choose UL. UL is a very small department, which has a very high retention rate, 'cuz they believe in 1 on 1 attention. Dr. Sears, the LSU chair, said they also highly encourage profs to get to know students, but the washout rate is higher. Now on placement, I know for a fact that UL’s ugrad program has a-bit better placement and starting salaries. Every freshman who wants an internship, well, gets one. For this reason, Dr. Ghlamabor has connections literally coming out of his ass, and since the grad program was just started back up again; it’s rebuilding, slowly </p>
<p> So if your just now entering the industry, I would go to LSU or NM for Grad, since they didnt have to shut their program down. </p>
<p>And lol, you are entering the industry in a very slow time Good Luck And yes UL is recruited VERY heavily by Schlumberger, Halliburton, and especially Chevron, 'cuz they have tons of offices in Lafayette.</p>
<p>Thanks Forever LSU and Houstonoilers27. It sounds like one can not go wrong with any of the programs.
How important is the Department’s ranking?</p>
<p>LSU and NMT are ranked at #8 and #10 respectively, but ULL is not in the top 10.</p>
<p>Yeah, i don’t know where Forever LSU is; he must of been staring at mud too long, until some landslide erupted. 
lol, jp, forever’s great. Anway, Forever can tell you everything, obviously, about LSU. Anyway, honestly, for graduate school; you can’t go wrong. For example, if you have a Masters in PE, you will most likely be more desirable than a guy with a BS in PE from UT; now that is saying something! Anyway, if you’re really serious about your career, I would recommend NMT. LSU has so, so many distractions, and it would be hard to give in. i.e. football, girls, parties, etc. While at NMT, you can only party with mud, rocks, and cows. Hey, that might be your thing, but hey; people are different! Back on track, NMT has the smallest department, excluding Marietta for PE. And at LSU you would be with a few hundred students, undergrad and grad. And if you’re just learning the ropes of PE; this may be a problem! They are very different schools, and if you choose LSU; I HOPE you got party-mode out of your system!</p>
<p>Good Luck</p>
<p>The departmental rankings aren’t at all important. What is important are the companies that recruit at the paticular institution where you are located. For example, there are a lot of smaller companies that recruit along the gulf coast due to the fact their company is located in this region. Many companies you’ve probably never heard of either. What is even more important than the location is your internship experience. Which, I assume since you are a mech E you have already gained some type of internship experience while obtaining your degree. So, you should be well set in the process of interviewing, filling out online apps and all that other nonsense. Now, the kicker is that the recruiting process for the larger corps is very competitive in petroleum engineering atleast. Due to the relatively small amount of jobs available and the current economic crisis, along with oil being at less than acceptable prices. It would help if you had internshiped with an oil company as a mechanical engineer. Then you would have networking ties and they would already know you are a prospective hire. But my guess is you didn’t because my cousins who were mechanical engineering majors who intershiped with oil companies all took the jobs they were offered. Hence, a graduate degree was the last thing on their mind. What would even help more than all the previously mentioned details, would be if you had some sort of industry ties i.e. your father, uncle, cousin was involved in the industry with a major company and you could use them as a reference. Which, with that you could bypass the chopping block that is the oil field recruiting process. Honestly, the last time I filled out an internship application was for Royal Dutch Shell. It took me about 3 hours to fill everything out, and it didn’t feel like I was applying to something, I felt as though I was being interogated, be prepared to surrender your GPA/CV/Thoughts to them for the app. One thing you will find out about the oil major corps is that they do everything to “T”. The smaller companies don’t really care too much about that, some of them don’t even follow regulation, because they are too small to care. Also, one thing to note about Shell in particular. If you ever have an interview with them it is not the traditional interview we all know and love. It is a guided, pre prepared, answer a set of questions related to how well you work with people, and how you feel about different situations. This really threw me for a loop. I felt like I was being mind raped. Also, about the interviewer, they don’t send any ole’ HR rep. In my case they had a double PHD Chief Engineer over Shell’s Ouality Assurance blah, blah, blahh. Basically what it consists of is him telling you that you know nothing. I was asked questions about a particular group of people, for example, “How would we resolve a disagreement or tension in between our workgroup in China, how would you communicate with these people, how would you satisfy their cutural needs, how would you meet their expectations and stay within the boundaries of their social structure?” Put it this way, they can care less about your accomplishments, who you beat out to get the interview, if you have straight A’s or not. They already expect you, as an engineering major, to be technically qualified, you don’t need to ellaborate on how good you are at identifying oil and gas signitures on a well log. They want to know how well you work with people. Can’t say the same for some of the other companies. Which is why their employee satisfaction ratings suffer the consequences. So, word of warning, if you do get an interview with them, be prepared to be humble, and act like Ms. America. They also asked questions like, “Describe an instance where you were working with a group that had a disagreement on the task/project you were working on, what did you do to resolve this, how did each person feel about the decision that was made to resolve this?” I went back to a situation I had in an engineering competition where in short “We had a disagreement on how to build a sea wall for a sporting event in case of a tsunami.” Yeah, put it this way, the recruiter wasn’t even sure about how to ask the questions more less how I was going to answer them. It looked like he was confused himself.</p>
<p>What school did you attend by the way and why petrol E?</p>
<p>You made some good points FoereverLSU. How does one know the companies that recruit at an institution anyway ? I am sure most of these schools get the big names (exxon, Schlum etc) going there every year to interview their students. But who knows how many they actually hire ? Also, it seems to me that if there are all these small companies in the Gulf coast, then the students there may have an advantage. Anyway, I did EE from an unkown engineering college years ago and have not done any internships in the oil industry.
I don’t have any family members in the industry either.
I like Petro E. for a number of reasons: type of work, which is a combination of field / office, I like engineering (maths, chem, phy) and like to solve problems, and there seem to be opportunities to advance your career there… I have already made that decision to go into it; I just want to make sure that I attend the right program so as to have a good shot at getting my first job in the field.</p>
<p>Well I know LSU reports their information. For example, Exxon hired 35 people last year. Chevron hired 22, shell and halliburton both hired 14 each. You get the trend. Shell only recruits from select universities. The number is in the 20’s. One thing to keep in mind about petrol is it is more planning and presentation depending on what kind of company you work for. It is a good job if you feel comfortable presenting projects in front of people. So communicaiton skills that aren’t needed in some branches of engineering are a must in Petrol E.</p>
<p>Another thing to mention, the whole offshore thing can get old fast. Good while your young, but when you get older and realize how short life is it can suck.</p>
<p>Based on these numbers, it appears everyone who wanted a job got one. If one graduates without a job and has to go through head hunters, that may not be good…</p>
<p>These weren’t just engineers though, those numbers are from everything discipline, from the business concentrations to the sciences. The oil companies hire a good amount of business majors around here. They do well too.</p>
<p>Hi forever i am new to this forum but u knw ur ur stuff frm my research! I am gona study PE frm UK yes UK! However our industry is tiny in comp to yours n jobs as roustabouts are few, hw can i get exp with oil cos here?? - hpe im nt intervening in this thread</p>