Four geosciences graduate students rock.
Literally.
Team members Brian Blackstone, Charles “Kit” Clark, Jessica Pritchard and Matt Corbett took home second place honors in the international finals of the Imperial Barrel Competition, a contest sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
“It’s quite a new contest that’s only been in existence for three years,” said Chris Fielding, professor of sedimentary geology and faculty adviser to the winning team.
Despite the newness of the contest, its purpose – to provide an outlet for geology students outside the classroom – is hardly undervalued.
“Our alumni are supportive,” Fielding said. “Some are very generous donors who like to see students given the same opportunities (they had).”
Such support and generosity is crucial when it comes to being involved and competing at the international level.
Fielding said that funding the team’s entrance into the contest meant paying for expensive computer programs, hardware and competition fees.
“It costs a bit of money to be able to participate,” he said. “We’re planning to establish a fund to help future students.”
The fund is off to a fairly substantial start with the runner-up prize money – a hefty $10,000 – serving as an initial deposit.
“Hopefully (the money) will catapult us into being more competitive in the future,” Corbett said.
Originally just wanting to expand his knowledge of petroleum geology, Corbett decided that the competition would provide him with real-world experience he couldn’t get elsewhere.
Teams are given a subsurface dataset based on actual calculations and research that geologists have already conducted. The teams must then analyze the dataset, interpret the prospectivity for oil or gas discovery and present on their findings.
“It seemed like a good opportunity to do work that I’d do in an actual job setting,” he said. “Even if we didn’t go far, we’d get a lot of attention, which increases the chances of getting an internship or job.”
Of course, they did go far – all the way to Denver.
Although the UNL team arguably had the shortest distance to travel, its journey to second place was not as effortless.
“We received the dataset back in January and were working on it for as many hours a week as possible,” Corbett said. “We were all finishing our masters degrees at the time, so it was something of a juggling act.”
Fellow team member Clark attributes the most paradoxical moment of his life to the amount of time he dedicated to the competition.
“It was awesome: All four of us were locked in the lab the entire spring break. We were trying to calculate the volume of the reserve,” he said. “We spent days and got nowhere. It was both the most exciting and most frustrating thing I’ve ever done in my life because we ultimately got it, and it was that much more rewarding.”
The students’ persistence paid off as they won the April regional competition in Tulsa, Okla. After that win, Clark said even more time had to go into gearing up for the international finals in Denver.
“In the final two weeks, it was close to maybe 40 hours a person,” he said. “It was crunch time.”
The team treated the competition as a full-time job, which is what Fielding said allowed him and his students to go as far as they did.
“All we did was prepare as thoroughly as we could,” he said. “We had all of the major aspects of the study covered.”
After rising above 89 other university teams and placing second to a team from Lomonosov State University in Moscow, Fielding said recruiters and prospective employers immediately approached his students.
“(The win) affects them massively and gives them a huge amount of exposure,” he said. “But it also gives a lot of visibility to the department, to the university and says, ‘We’ve arrived.’”
mekitarivas@dailynebraskan.com
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