Welcome to Schlumberger

When I originally interviewed with Schlumberger I thought I was interviewing for an internship position. However, they tend to not give out internships till the summer before the year of graduation. Since I am not graduating for awhile they gave me a spot in their Field Camp instead.

The Field Camp is a week long camp where you can get a taste of the job in a real setting and from people with experience. In the oil and gas industry the work is hard, the hours are long, its dirty, you are outside in the elements, plus many more challenges that make it very different from the "average job."  Not everyone is up for a job with those elements, and because of that Schlumberger has a 20% or lower retention rate of new employees that head straight into the field. Ya, it is that challenging. So in order to help people see if they might like it before the company invests a lot of money in training, they started the week long Field Camp.

It was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever encountered. The week long trip was paid for including our plane tickets. The "camp" was hosted at the Schlumberger training site in Kellyville and we stayed at the Schlumberger housing site in Tulsa. This company is huge and very nice to their employees from what I could tell. They owned an entire apartment complex and ran it somewhat like a hotel but with more features. There was 19 of use, 10 girls and 9 guys (more girls than guys - very surprising for engineering) We were from schools from all over the US and Canada. There was a few people from MSU, and a few from Ohio State, but majority of everyone else was the only one from their specific school.

Every morning we were on the bus at 6 am and taken out to the training site. UTH (up the hill) had classrooms and training rooms and DTH (down the hill) had a fully functional rig site set-up, cementing and fracturing operation, wireline, mud-engineering, etc. (For those of you not familiar with oil, it was an area with plenty of opportunity to get hands on and very dirty). Yes, they really called it Up-The-Hill and Down-The-Hill.

All day long we had training on different topics that we had to later present on at the end of the week (If you have any controversial questions about Fracturing or Oil I can answer them - I know it all (kidding but I do know a lot)). Therefore, you had to pay attention no matter how tired you were. Every bus ride, to anywhere, almost everyone was asleep. After training all day, we would come back, have an hour of free time and then have to work on our presentations and complete team building challenges. On that Friday we presented on our topics, and were thoroughly questioned by the field engineers on the material. It was the hardest presentation I have ever given and some of the hardest questions I have ever been asked on the spot.

I loved the people I met and I ended up making some great friends. As for the job ....I think I want to be a field engineer. Why? well...

You are only a field engineer for about 3-5 years
The job is a challenge which I am always drawn to
You move or change location about every 1-2 years
The job is hands on
No desk
No business causal (Blue FR's all day, everyday)
I can live almost anywhere in the world
Money (I have ....too large of loans and I would be able to pay them off very fast)
And after I finish my 5 years I can stay with Schlumberger and go pretty much anywhere or I can go to any other industry.

For right now, my hope is that I get an internship with them, work for them out of school for 5 years ish, and then later on I can always go back to Bio-medical or any other industry that might peak my interest at the time. I still love Bio-medical and am planning on working in the industry but in the meantime, I think I found a slight detour.

Change in plans, I'll see you in Oklahoma

So last fall if you would have talked to me about career paths I would have given you my traditional answer that I have been using for the last few years; one could say, "my dream." Those that know me well and have heard about this dream a million times are aware that it consists of working as a mechanical engineer in the Bio-medical industry. I have also wanted to take that "dream" a little farther and work more specifically in prosthetic devices for veterans. While this has been my plan for ....well forever, it has been changed slightly. I was able to work for DePuy last spring in the area of Orthopaedic implants, which gave me a good taste of the medical device industry.

I loved it, but not as much as I thought I would. DePuy is a great company to work for, don't get me wrong. However, I realized at this job and in the past job that I had in the Automotive industry, that I can't stand sitting still at a desk. IT DRIVES ME INSANE. Literally crazy. Remember that Autoclave sterilize project I was working on? As boring as that was, it was an excuse to get out of my desk. Based on all of my experience I realized right away that I need something more hands on in the manufacturing side of the engineering world.

Then one day the fall engineering career fair was upon me and I was talking to different people about the different companies I was going to approach at the event. I distinctly remember saying, "I will never work in oil and gas." (keep this in mind). So, I was walking and talking to some of my selected 300+ companies at the fair and I was trying to decide who to choose next; that was when I stumbled across Schulmberger.

Schulmberger, pronounced Sh-lum-ber-jay (it's french), is one of the largest or perhaps THE largest well services company in the world. Companies like BP own the oil, and companies such as Schlumberger are the main part of the drilling, fracturing, cementing, measurement, etc. processes. At the career fair they wear their bright blue FR's (fire retardant work coveralls) making them hard to miss and causing a pull at the hands on part of my personality. I had a moment of "what the hell," got myself an interview and got a spot in their Field Camp. I finished my work semester on Friday, May 2nd, moved back to East Lansing (EL) on the 2nd and 3rd, and headed out to Kellyville, Oklahoma on the 4th.

So much for never wanting to try oil and gas.

Do 10 pushups, 20 sit-ups, 30 lunges, and then run 100 miles

Warsaw, Indiana is not that big with a population of about 10,000 people. While I don't mind small towns considering I live by much smaller ones in Colorado, because of the slightly chilly winter I wasn't able to get out much. Then I got some kick in the butt inspiration. A friend of mine told her story later on last year about how she had been super self conscious about her body and those feelings had drove her to become bulimic. This was crazy news considering that I had always looked up to her in high school not only for her looks, but the confidence I thought she had, her smarts, and her athleticism. Since the start of college my self confidence had been lowering drastically due to many personal relationships. Her inspiration led me to walk in to Anytime Fitness my first week in Warsaw and begin some serious self transformation.

There I met Mandy, my personal trainer and now awesome friend. Mandy has a work hard,or go home attitude like myself, which I was able to adapt to perfectly. I told her I wanted to bulk up and that's exactly what she helped me accomplish. In 6 weeks, I gained 6 inches in total (volume not height) and 6 pounds. Not only was I stronger but I had the muscle showing to prove it. In the following 6 weeks, I gained another 6 inches and another 4 pounds. I changed my diet and was at the gym working hard 5 to 6 days a week.

It was the confidence boost that I needed and I am not planing on stopping anytime soon. I am planing on gaining another 10 ish pounds in muscle this summer. After working with Mandy and developing a love for the gym and taking care of myself, I have decided to study to become a personal trainer. By the end of the summer I plan on being certified and would like to start training once I head back to Indiana in the fall.

Biomedical Engineering at its finest

 Last fall I accepted a co-op position with DePuy Synthes, in Warsaw, Indiana. For those of you that don't know, a co-op is an internship during the semester where you go and work for more than one semester. So for example, I worked there for the spring semester, then I have the summer off, then I go back and will work there for my fall semester, then I come back for school next spring semester, and finally I work there again next summer. Altogether, I will complete 3 rotations (3 semesters = 1 year) of work with a better chance of getting hired after I graduate. While my graduation is now delayed till Spring of 2016, the more rotations the better and I am not in a hurry to start working for the rest of my life.

So rant/background information aside, I worked there this last spring in the Hips Research and Development group. DePuy is a Johnson & Johnson company so the atmosphere was incredible. There was a gym in the building with personal training and everything, a cafeteria, and a group of people that were the most relaxed adults I have ever seen while working. Overall it was good. At first I was very bored, however as I started to express how bored I was to the other engineers, the more random projects I was given.

Random was a good thing, in which I was able to work on many different things. I did some motion simulation where you take all of the 3D models of each of the hip components on the computer, put them together, and move them in order to determine the range of motion for each combination. As engineering-like and wordy as that sounds, it is actually super cool and I am one of very few people that actually know how to do it on NX (hence why I was hired). I also did some sterilization testing which is the opposite; sounds really cool but isn't really. All you do is take parts and put them in an Autoclave (steam and pressure sterilizer - hospitals use), take them out after 45 minutes, let them cool (parts@140 ish degrees C), check them for rust, and then throw them back in for another cycle. Lame, I've literally done it 500 times, and by literally I mean actually; again lame.

After feeling like my brain had melted slightly from Autoclaving my life away, one day that I met this engineer named Frank. He is one of the greatest engineers to work with. Now he gives you a lot of crap (in a joking/good way ---sometimes), but because of him I got to work on some pretty interesting projects. We were trying to mold the acetabulum and the femur of cadavers accurately (haha - sarcasm because of the difficulty of the task). Therefore, I completed my first cadavar lab. Granted it was a little weird at first, but I found the intricacies of the body amazing. It is crazy to think that once it gets damaged it can never be the same; no matter how great the engineering.

Ketchup

 Since I am starting this blog about half way through the year I thought it would be good if I caught you up on some of the main events of my spring. Be prepared it was somewhat of a busy time. I usually have to explain more than once because people have problems keeping track. That, however is the beauty of it being written in a blog. Rather then explaining it over again very fast in my excited voice (most of you should be familiar), you can just re-read at your own pace. Engineer here :)

You have been WARNED

The other day I realized that there are a many people that I haven't talked with in quite a long time. In order to share some of the events that have happened in my life in the last year or so and the new stuff currently going on, I decided to try a blog. When reading the blog, imagine that I am talking to you in person. I hope that it sounds somewhat like a conversation with me in person when read out loud, therefore my "talking" grammar should not always be expected to be similar to writing grammar. :) But, I hope that by writing it that way it gives you a better idea as to the emotional context of my many different stories. Some of the posts might start from a little ways back, and others might not. At times some may seem random, but hey, my life tends to be slightly random at first glance. I am warning you.