<p>i.e. Exxon, Shell, Connoco Phillips. Since they’re offering 90-100k starting salaries for Ph D engineers, they can prob have the cream of the crop. Are we talking top 10 schools? 20? 30? 50? Thanks.</p>
<p>you would be surprised…probably University of Texas at Austin and some random texan schools would probably be biggies…hey is geochemistry a good field to study?</p>
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90-100k starting salaries for PhD Engineers is not going to allow you to have access to the “cream of the crop”. I believe they do pay more than 90-100k/year for people that have a Master’s though. And usually, they’re paying you for a skill/expertise so what school you come from in this field doesn’t matter in the same way that it does for ibanking.
Also, for engineering there’s no purpose to go higher than a Master’s degree unless if you want to enter academia.</p>
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<p>True in some fields, but not engineering. There are many R&D and design jobs that require a doctorate (just like chemistry, biology, etc.)</p>
<p>Oil companies offer so much for several reasons. Often the location of the work is not the most desirable place, so they offer a lot to offset that. Also, oil companies are very short on engineers. They have one of the oldest workforces of engineers, and are losing so many to retirement at such a fast rate that they absolutely have to attract new hires. They also have to overcome the stigma in a lot of peoples’ minds that goes along with the fact that they are “Big Oil.”</p>
<p>I have a friend who was offered $80k straight out of his undergrad by ConocoPhillips. He and I are both finishing up our undergrad this semester at UIUC as mechanical engineers, and UIUC is not a traditional oil school. Basically, you can get recruited from most major engineering companies, though going somewhere like Texas would probably be slightly easier.</p>
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<p>100% false. EE PhD’s find tons of work.</p>
<p>Rice University (Houston, TX), UT Austin, Oklahoma, TX A&M</p>
<p>bon3head, from what I’ve heard, you have to have a 3.5 to even be considered by the big oil companies, so you and your friend must have pretty stellar GPAs. I’m hoping I can get out of here with a 3.4/3.5 and I’m coming from U Buffalo, a good but not great school, so I doubt I’d be garnering 80k coming out of undergrad. </p>
<p>I’m just worried that if I end up with a 3.3 and don’t get into a top 20 grad school companies like Exxon aren’t gonna look at me. But do they really recruit locally? Obviously they recruit Rice, UT and Tex A&M, but do they also recruit schools like Oklahoma, Okie State, Texas Tech, U Houston?</p>
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<p>Yes. They actually don’t recruit Rice that heavily (at least when I was there). The major oil companies go to all the big state school (Illinois, GT, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, etc.)</p>
<p>I don’t know where the “3.5” cut off came from. Every one I worked with had a 3.0 minimum GPA with experience being the single largest criteria, not GPA.</p>
<p>finally an industry that does not favor ivy leaguers</p>
<p>“They actually don’t recruit Rice that heavily (at least when I was there).”</p>
<p>Every oil company was at rice this year… shell, connoco, exxon, chevron, bp. Along with some of the others e.g. slumberger, baker hughes.</p>
<p>Those companies go everywhere, particularly if they’re Houston-based.</p>
<p>The difference is that, as recently as a few years ago, several of those companies had higher hiring targets for UH in Houston than Rice. I’d say that qualifies as not being recruited very heavily.</p>
<p>OK cool that’s a relief. I thought they would only recruit the elite schools. I’d love to live in Texas or somewhere down south and work in the kinds of things oil companies do…oh and the money doesn’t sound bad either.</p>
<p>I am mmore interested in what majors do oil compannies recruit from…I knwo the typical chemical and petroleum engineering but for example what about biochemistry or geophysics??</p>
<p>Also what about environmental engineering? I am from an oil producing country…so I am very open to any oil working major…also i go to a school without an engineering major so I want to shift by doing a PhD in one of the engineering sciences</p>
<p>People in geology get recruited, or at least they used to. Perhaps it is more sophisticated now.</p>
<p>Someone I know from another place online went to Texas A&M and majored in geology. He spent a year or two off on boats doing oil exploration type work. From the sounds of it, he wasn’t making nearly what most of the people on here talk about PetEs making, though (he also said the European company he works for tended to pay less than American companies).</p>
<p>Oil recruiting is huge in University of Texas - Austin. Following that would be Texas A&M. </p>
<p>If you want to work for Big Oil, UT is the place to be.</p>
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<p>Many of the schools mentioned here were Top 15 engineering schools. If you want to go to a school ranked lower than that, you’re going to need to be a standout student and you’ll likely have to do more leg work (go to them, rather than having them come to you to recruit).</p>
<p>It also depends on your degree. Big oil needs many plant and operations engineers, so they hire quite a bit at the BS and MS level from all sorts of schools. Plus, they limit their exposure to the elite schools at this level (meaning that they’ll hire roughly equally at the top and bottom of the first tier schools), because many of the “elite” students are looking for a higher degree or law/med school. </p>
<p>When you get into PhD researchers, they only need a small number of those, and they’re not worried about someone quitting in a few years for another degree. So they can focus more on the “elite schools”.</p>
<p>I talked with an engineering manager with shell’s refining division a month ago. He told me they don’t recruit heavily from schools in the southern region who have close ties with the energy/oil industry, Texas Schools, Louisiana Schools, OU schools. Overall I think it is close to 30 schools, or it may be less than that. Now companies like Chevron will recruit and hire way more people. Honestly, people from elite schools don’t go into the oil industry. They are more concerned about cutting edge research in new fields like biotech and the like. You can look at school websites like MIT and read where there students accepted employment. The last report I read had one person who took a job with exxonmobile. The rest are working on wallstreet or aerospace/computer industries.</p>
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