Career Interviews

Meet some young engineering graduates working for Chevron.

Graduate Petroleum Engineer

Name: Holly Duder 
Age: 24
Job title: Graduate Petroleum Engineer

Can you give an example of what your job involves, perhaps a day in the life of?   
My job involves organising for wells that don't produce enough oil anymore to be abandoned to government regulations.  A lot of project management!

Tell us about something cool that happens at work
Working on Barrow Island in the North West of Australia, I see the most amazing variety of wildlife!  One day there is sharks and sting rays off the beach and other days giant lizards called Perenties wander past as you work!

What made you follow a career in engineering with Chevron?
After completing vacation work with Chevron, it was obvious that Chevron is a company that can build up your skill set as an engineer and enable you to get valuable and broad experiences.

What do you enjoy about your job?
The time spent in the oil-fields is fantastic - you are right out there amongst it!  The amount of responsibility graduates are given is also a definite benefit.

What you dislike about your job?
Nothing!  I am thoroughly enjoying the job!

Was this always what you wanted to do when you were at school? What subjects did you do?  
Since I was 15 I wanted to be an oil and gas engineer! We had someone come and speak to us about the oil and gas industry and that's when I knew this was the life for me! I studied the usual maths and sciences to get into Engineering, plus French and English Literature.

Graduate Facilities Engineer 

Name: Sebastian Bunney
Age: 23
Job title: Graduate Facilities Engineer

Can you give an example of what your job involves, perhaps a day in the life of?
I help manage Chevron’s interest in Australia’s largest oil and gas resource development, mainly through liaising with partners from other oil and gas companies and developing reports that assist my managers in making important decisions. I use a lot of math in my job to develop these reports.

Can you provide an anecdote about something interesting or cool or amazing or unexpected that happened at work?
Once when I was working in Texas I had the chance to fly by helicopter out to the enormous Genesis offshore gas production rig and spend three days finding out how it all worked. If you were to take Genesis out of the water, it would be taller than every building in Perth.

What made you follow a career in engineering with Chevron?
I’ve always enjoyed solving problems, and I was good at maths and science at school – engineering seemed a natural choice! During university, Chevron provided me with an opportunity to work as an engineering intern in Houston, Texas, and I decided to stay with the company after that.

What do you enjoy about your job?
My job is thought-provoking and intriguing, and I’m learning new skills and ideas every week.

What do you dislike about your job?
My job can sometimes be very challenging, and I might have to understand a new concept very quickly – kind of like being thrown in the deep end.

Was this always what you wanted to do when you were at school? What subjects did you do?
I wanted to be an engineer ever since Year 9.  When I found out I was good at Chemistry I decided to study Chemical Engineering and work in oil and gas. At school I studied Calculus, Applicable Maths, Physics, Chemistry, English Literature and Japanese.

Graduate Petroleum Engineer

Name: Jason Beard
Age: 25
Job title: Graduate Petroleum Engineer

Can you give an example of what your job involves, perhaps a day in the life of?
I usually arrive at the office between 7:30-8:00am, and get out of there by 5:00-5:30pm (even work doesn't get in the way of footy training!)

I run a lot of computer models that simulate an oil or gas reservoir. This is to see how much oil or gas we'll be able to get out of the ground, how fast we can get it out, how long we can produce it for, etc. Also, because we are not producing from the gas field I'm working on yet, I often look at similar types of gas fields around the world (that are producing already) to see what we might expect when we do start producing from ours.

Being new to the company and new to the oil and gas industry, there are lots of training courses that I can attend to improve my technical skills. I do about 5-6 weeks of this training per year.

What kind of cool stuff do you get to do on the job?
After only about 4 months with Chevron I got to go offshore to supervise some tests that my project team was doing on one of our gas wells. I got to fly from Perth to Barrow Island (even though this meant leaving Perth at 4:30am!) then jumping on a helicopter to fly from Barrow Island to the floating drilling rig that we were using to drill the well.

The rig was located approximately 180km off the coast, where I spent three nights while we completed the job. The saying "time is money" really does apply out there because it is so expensive to hire these rigs. So even though there were times when I wasn't doing much because the job hadn’t started yet, when it did get started I had to see it through from beginning to end, which meant some very long days! But this was well and truly made up for by the awesome food they have out on the rig. Every meal is buffet style with heaps to choose from, so I definitely had my fair share!

What made you choose engineering?
My general interest in engineering as a career stems from growing up on the family farm in WA's Wheatbelt. I developed an inquisitive nature as to 'how things worked' and I loved helping out whenever there was machinery involved. 

What do you enjoy about your job?
I enjoy the fact that my role as a Petroleum Engineer at Chevron does not limit the types of tasks that I might be expected to perform. With excellent learning opportunities available, both through formal training and on-the-job experience, I'm hopeful that I will fulfil a number of different assignments in a variety of worldwide locations throughout my career.

What do you dislike about your job?
Despite sometimes having to put up with the unpredictability of technology when involved in long periods of computer simulation tasks, there's not really much to dislike about my job. However, many of my friends and family naturally associate an 'engineer' with building bridges or designing machines, so the slightly more abstract nature of petroleum or reservoir engineering can be tough to describe at times!

Was this always what you wanted to do when you were at school? What subjects did you do?
I completed a questionnaire in year 9 to see what job our general interests might lead us to and this lead me into engineering. My work experience in  Year 10 was with my uncle's mining engineering company in Perth. Since I grew up and completed kindergarten to Year 10 in the farming town of Cunderdin, which is 2 hours out of Perth, going to the city for work experience was a big deal! The TEE subjects I chose were the ones I'd need to get into Engineering at university: Physics, Chemistry, Calculus, Applicable Maths, Economics and English.

After I had successfully completed my TEE I enrolled in an Engineering/Commerce double degree at UWA. The first year of engineering is general - which was good as I wasn’t sure which area I wanted to go in to. By second year uni, I decided to follow oil and gas engineering because it wasn't as common as some of the others types of engineering and I thought it was going to be an industry that would have a strong future in Western Australia (which has proven true so far...). Since graduating I have been enjoying it ever since!