Honors senior Olivia Paschall is interning this summer with ExxonMobil in Houston, Texas. She is working on an exploration team that is looking for opportunities in North America. Specifically she is spending her time integrating well, engineering, and seismic data to analyze reservoir potential in a prolific hydrocarbon system.
As a geology major, this is a potential career path for Olivia; she took the internship in order to see what it is like to work in this business. Olivia explained, "I am hoping to gauge my interest in the industry and get experience looking at types of data I have never seen before. I'm also using it as an opportunity to live in a new place and meet lots of new people." For her thesis research, Olivia is studying rocks deposited during the Devonian-Carboniferous transition, time periods that coincided with major hydrocarbon burial. In her exploration work with ExxonMobil, she is seeing her research applied to a real world business. With this industry experience, Olivia is weighing her options between graduate school and future employment with a company like ExxonMobil.
This photograph contributed by Olivia, shows her at work at the ExoonMobil facility in Houston.
Story by Garrett Alexandrea McDowell, Ph.D.
