AS SEEN IN THE OCTOBER 2002 ISSUE
AS SEEN IN THE OCTOBER 2002 ISSUE
Ballots will be mailed in the spring.Results will be posted May 15, 2003. |
Officer Candidates:Vice President 2003-04 |
||||
Editor's note: Candidates for AAPG office have been given the opportunity to respond briefly to the subject: "Why I Accepted the Invitation to be a Candidate for AAPG Office." Their responses - and brief biographical information on each candidate - will be published in the EXPLORER for three issues. Responses available through the election here on the AAPG Web site.Here are the responses from vice president candidates Douglas G. Patchen and Erik P. Mason. Candidates were asked to limit their responses to 500 words.Candidates:President-Elect
|
Editor's
note:
Candidates
for AAPG office have been given the opportunity to respond briefly
to the subject:
"Why I Accepted the Invitation to be a Candidate for AAPG Office."
Their responses -- and biographical information provided by each
candidate and edited only for grammar and spelling, including the
biography -- will be published in the EXPLORER beginning here and
continuing through the next two issues. Responses will be available
throughout the election on the AAPG Web site. Ballots will be mailed
in the spring.
|
Why I Accepted the Invitation To Be a Candidate for AAPG OfficeBy DOUGLAS G. PATCHENObviously, it is a great honor to be nominated to be a candidate for an AAPG office, and actually, it is a humbling experience as well. Having served five years on the Advisory Council, I can attest to the depth of the pool of highly qualified candidates that was considered each year for the various offices. With this in mind, it was one thing to sign the form last fall agreeing to be considered as a candidate; it was quite another when I received the phone call from President Gries this spring asking me to confirm that I was still willing to do so. Thinking back over the years, AAPG has probably been a bigger part of my professional life than I realized for a long time. Coming out of a northeastern college, I was much more aware of GSA than I was AAPG until I began working at the West Virginia Geological Survey and met Dudley Cardwell, a long time AAPG member and one of the finest gentlemen I have ever had the good fortune to know. Through Dudley, I got involved in the Committee on Statistics of Drilling and the AAPG Development Papers, an involvement that lasted more than 20 years. About that same time I was asked to serve as the Appalachian Basin coordinator for the COSUNA Project, or Correlation of Stratigraphic Units of North America, and that led to my being asked to serve on the Stratigraphic Correlations Committee. However, even when I began serving on this committee in the early 1980s, I still was not an AAPG member. Eventually I realized how much I really enjoyed working with the highly competent and fully committed people on the CSD and COSUNA projects, and that each year I had been presenting papers at the Eastern Section meeting and attending the national convention, so I gave in to the annual plea of Fred Dix to become a member myself. Why did I wait so long? Perhaps as a goal-oriented and slightly cautious person, I thought I was too busy doing other things to commit to AAPG. I don't mind planning, and do a lot of it, but to me planning means little or nothing unless those plans are implemented, and this is what I really enjoy doing. I use this same approach when considering whether or not to join a professional organization. Unless I have the time to get really involved, and feel that I can make a significant contribution and make things happen, I do not join an organization just for the sake of joining. I commonly apply this philosophy during discussions with those who have dropped out of AAPG, and complained that they did not "get enough out of it." My response is, "What did you put into it?" The more you put into an organization like AAPG, the more you will get out of it. It really is as simple as that, at least for me. When I served on the Advisory Council, I noticed that on many occasions AC members who also were in the House of Delegates or on the Executive Committee saw the same issue a little differently, while those who were in neither saw it still differently from their AC-only perspective. That intrigued me, because I always like to understand all sides of an issue before I reach a decision. So, having served on the Advisory Council and in the House of Delegates, I look forward to the opportunity to see AAPG from the perspective of the Executive Committee. AAPG is a business, and not a small business. As such, some decisions made by the Executive Committee and executive director must be made with the health and future growth of the business foremost in their minds. At the same time, however, AAPG is composed of individuals, and these individuals have personal needs that AAPG can and should address. I look forward to the opportunity to be responsive to the needs of the membership and to be part of an Executive Committee that promotes a strong corporate entity while advancing the well-being of its members as our constitution states. The need for education, training and re-training never ends, due to the cyclic nature of the industry and the constant development of new technology. I have been around long enough to observe the up and down nature of the oil and gas industry, seemingly with a cycle in every decade since the 1960s. And I have noticed how quickly and efficiently AAPG has responded to the needs of their members during and after each decline. In the 1970s, many petroleum geologists lost their jobs and found new employment in the coal industry. AAPG responded with the Energy Minerals Division and programs to retrain these members. In the 1980s, after another downturn, many members began a new career in the environmental arena. Again, AAPG responded with the Division of Environmental Geosciences, more training and new publications. This is a good track record, but the obligation to respond to member needs never ends. The industry continues to change each year, with new technology and an increasingly more global perspective. As we reach out to new members and affiliated societies in other parts of the world, we need to be proactive to fully invest them in our organization. And, we need to do this not only for the working petroleum professional, but for the petroleum students as well, those who are the future of the global industry and AAPG. New technology to transfer, students to teach, interdisciplinary teamwork to promote, an environment to protect: these are among the key elements in the future of our organization, and all must be addressed by future executive committees of AAPG. It is an exciting prospect, and I hope not only to stick around for a few more years to be part of it, but to have the opportunity to be an active, productive member of one of these Executive Committees as well. |
Why I Accepted the Invitation To Be a Candidate for AAPG OfficeBy ERIK P. MASONIt is a genuine honor to be a candidate for AAPG vice president and I truly appreciate having this opportunity. It represents a chance to give back to an organization that has given much to me, and to make a contribution to the petroleum geologic community at large. Why did I accept the invitation to be a candidate for AAPG office? First, I want to help guide AAPG into the future by building on its foundation of encouraging technical excellence. And second, I would like to actively help grow the AAPG membership in order to ensure the long-term health of the organization. AAPG was founded on scientific and technical excellence. These strengths are on display each year in publications, short courses, field trips, and technical sessions at domestic and international conferences. They remain at the core of AAPG and are the reasons many of us joined this organization. To continue to build upon this foundation, I support and would like to help implement some of the following ongoing and potentially new initiatives: Increase the quality of technical sessions by encouraging organizing committees to hold fewer of them with longer (e.g. 30 minute vs. 20 minute) papers. Experiment with smaller sessions that allow for more discussion. Encourage questioning from session chairs making this the expectation. Continue experimentation with different "poster session" formats allowing for increased innovation by authors. Increase the number of Hedberg Conferences, which provide a unique forum that can drive technical and scientific breakthroughs. Organize a conference(s) focused on exploration successes and failures (war stories), methods and techniques. Dedicate a BULLETIN issue each year to exploration successes, large and small, and exploration playmakers. Establish an exploration newsletter that keeps current on scout activities, focusing initially on one area domestically as a pilot and expanding to other regions in time. Continue to expand APPEX in Houston and internationally while keeping it focused, as it presently is, on showing prospects vs. distributing glossy brochures, as has become the norm in some other prospect expos. Start with a core area. Given success, expand to other areas, as has been done with AAPG publications (idea suggested by Nathan Kuhl to Robbie Gries at a recent New Orleans Geological Society meeting) Beyond these specific initiatives, we must continue to systematically build AAPG membership by attracting new, and especially young, members. I fully support the continued strengthening of AAPG student chapters and expanded support of Student Expos (job fairs) such as those held annually in Houston. I also believe that we can significantly increase international membership through membership drives associated with international conferences. We can also reach out more to geophysicists and engineers who could benefit from AAPG's benefits and services. In summary, if elected I will do all that I can to help AAPG. I am honored and grateful to have this opportunity. |
Vice
President
West
Virginia Geological Survey, Morgantown, W.Va.
Shell
Team Leader -- Gulf of Mexico New Ventures, Houston.
Increase
the value of conventions and conferences to members.