Matt Peters
map006@marietta.edu
As oil prices have plunged, many companies have halted expansion and even reduced staff, leaving petroleum engineering students with fewer employment opportunities. Consequently, enrollment in Marietta’s petroleum engineering program is projected to decrease drastically in the coming year.
This issue was highlighted by a March 12 National Public Radio article spotlighting the petroleum-engineering program at Marietta College. The author, Noah Admas, stressed the value of a liberal arts education in an industry that is, at times, unpredictable.
“Probably in the time I’ve been here, this is the biggest fluctuation we’ve had,” Tom Perry, executive director of strategic communications and marketing, told The Marcolian.
“We try to do our best to prepare for it, and sometimes it can happen kind of dramatically or happen very quickly, like it did this time,” Perry said. “The easiest way to look at it is the cost of gas, and how quickly we watched it drop from almost $4 a gallon to where it is now, around a $1.90 a gallon.”
Perry explained that current juniors and seniors entered the program at a time when the oil prices were high, and the industry was flourishing. Now students are struggling to find the same career opportunities that recent graduates were afforded.
“A year, two years into studying, some of them have watched those prices drop and it’s now impacting their potential for internships or their potential for gaining employment,” Perry said.
Senior Makenzie Wilson says she has experienced this pattern firsthand.
“I came in at the max peak when everyone was getting jobs, everything was doing great, everyone was making lots of money. But with such a cyclical industry, I kind of hit at the wrong spot – on the decline,” Wilson said.
However, Wilson urges prospective students not to be discouraged by this decline.
“It’s hard to tell when these things actually come, but to go in [to the program] now would be a good idea. You would get more attention because there are fewer students. And by the time you get out, it’ll be a lot better,” she said.
Perry also believes that, given a few years, this trend will be reversed.
“It’s a very cyclical thing that happens,” Perry said. “Many of them anticipate – especially if you are coming into the program now – by the time you’re graduating, the market’s probably going to adjust itself again.”
Still, many students are perturbed by the instability of what promised to be a secure career field. In the past, students were often able to secure internships as early as their freshman year. Now, even seniors are struggling to find them.
“If I was a graduating [high school] senior at this time, I probably wouldn’t go into petroleum engineering, just because of the problems I’m having right now,” sophomore Aaron Smith said.
Smith is one of many petroleum-engineering students troubled by the lack of internship opportunities.
“Experience is really hard to get, especially now. A couple years ago, you could get a freshman internship pretty easily making like $20 an hour,” Smith said. “But with oil being down and with companies laying off people, they’re not hiring as many interns as they normally would,” Smith said.
Smith added that, while he appreciates Marietta’s small class sizes and liberal arts foundation, he believes the petroleum-engineering program is too narrowly focused. Smith says it would be advantageous for petroleum engineers to be well versed in more than one branch of engineering.
“I think the program should focus more on mechanical engineering – especially now – because it’s a really niche program. It was really good when the prices were high because then you just slide right in to open fields and companies are really excited to hire you. But now, I feel like we really need to diversify the skills we have,” he said.
Smith believes the program could be improved with more diverse engineering programs that would normally be included in the curriculums of many larger engineering schools.
“I think we should definitely have an AutoCAD class. It’s pretty much 3-D modeling of machines, parts, and stuff. That’s just a basic skill that engineers should have today because they no longer do things by hand, it’s all on computers,” Smith said.
While he wishes the program offered more courses, Smith says there’s no denying the fact that a petroleum-engineering degree from Marietta carries quite a bit of weight in the petroleum field.
“You have less than a hundred people graduate each year. So, having Marietta College on your resume, other alumni see it and it’s a really nice tight-knit circle that you wouldn’t get at any other college,” he said.
Others maintain that Marietta’s unique educational approach is what sets it apart from other institutions.
“Probably the most important thing to know is that Marietta College is the only liberal arts college in the country that offers petroleum engineering,” Perry said. “Everybody else who is getting a petroleum engineering degree is coming from usually a big state school or an engineering-type school, and doesn’t have that.”
“But I think they are very much being educated for a career, whereas we are educating people not only for a career, but for the life that they can have after they leave here,” Perry added.
