I know I posted this in the Stanford forum, but I felt like the post would be more appropriate here.
I am interested in becoming a petroleum engineer, but it seems as though recently the oil industry has been undergoing a slump. Would aiming for a degree in the field still make sense?
Also, are niche engineering applicants differentiated from the rest of the applicant pool?
You guys are probably going to ask me why I insist on applying to Stanford. Basically because I have really conservative(?) parents that expect me to go to an Ivy school or a private that is on par. If I told them I wanted to a public school in Texas, they would probably excommunicate me, much less help me pay for school. Honestly, I really don’t see myself at a public school in the Midwest/Texas either.
Unless your parents are willing to open their wallets wide and make an eight-figure donation to “an Ivy or a private that is on par”, it’s far from assured you’d get admitted into any of them.
It’s a lottery no matter how strong you are. I know a kid who was rejected from Stanford but accepted to both Harvard and Yale. A far lesser qualified legacy was taken. It is not objective. Have safeties.
That is only the surface. The bigger question is why would anyone go to Stanford or “an Ivy” for petroleum?
It’s not a matter of easy or hard. There are FAR too many fully qualified applicants for too few slots. You can’t just be good. You have to be good AND lucky. Short of being a legacy or a star, there’s nothing a student can do to guarantee admission. They all reject 4.0/2400 students every year.
Which public school in Texas? UT and A&M have excellent engineering schools. Both have undergrad/grad PGE programs that are considered among the best in the world. I can’t imagine why your parents would be upset with either of those choices.
Wow - the PE info at the attached linked really is bad.
If ChemEs were going into the petro industry in droves, like say in the early 80s, this is also going to crush demand for ChemE graduates (although maybe cheap petro mean cheap feedstocks and more chem production … I just don’t know).
My ChemE degree was not worth much in mid 80s once the petro jobs dried up (they had the high salaries), but luckily I was hired into Aero that was going into boom times due to the Reagan programs.
I would not plan my future on past performance, as the brokers like to say … or to add other metaphors would not join the lemmings or the herd of buffalo heading over the cliff. If there is a massive glut of recent grads building, it will take years for all these people to get hired, probably more than 4.
Chem E maybe … Mech E better … maybe IE if you want plant environment. ME is a huge field …
The good news is that almost no school would make you pick your engineering field now.
If you have some really impressive storyline on why petro that helps you get into stanford, maybe go for it.
I also would be hesitant to spend $280K to get a degree that isn’t in demand.
Then again, being at Stanford … you will likely be lured in by CS/EE …