President's Message
Bérczi
Dear Readers,
Spring, with the revival of the nature after winter, is the season of youth. Recently youth has been the subject of considerable attention by the petroleum industry in general and in the AAPG particular, with the continuing shortage of scientists and engineers in the petroleum industry. In March, two events occurred that make it important to talk about this issue in the president’s message again.
Under the auspices of APPEX week in London (March 5-7) representatives of the Council of the European Region, the President of the AAPG and top officials of the Tulsa HQ met representatives of the Youth Committee (YC) of the World Petroleum Council (WPC) together with the Director General and the Information Director of the same organisation. It has been agreed that the two organisations can complement each other’s activity since the YC represents young professionals while AAPG student chapters comprise university students not engaged in any industry entity. Additionally AAPG membership focuses on exploration and production while the WPC represents the complete vertically integrated industry. It has been agreed that participants will focus on two occasions to start collaboration through mobilizing their respective memberships and member organisations. The YC of WPC will invite representatives of the AAPG student chapters to contribute actively to the Youth Programme of the forthcoming 19th World Petroleum Congress in Madrid in June 2008. In turn the AAPG Student Chapters in Europe are going to encourage their members in organizing and attending the next milestone of this co-operation, the European Youth Forum of the WPC due to take place in October 2009 in Strasbourg, France.
One week later (March 14-15) the first ever European Qualification Round of the Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) took place in Prague, Czech Republic. The IBA is an AAPG brand and is a contest for integrated university teams to demonstrate their skill in interpreting and evaluating data covering exploration acreage provided by the AAPG’s IBA Contest Management. The teams are ranked on the basis of their performance in delivering their results in front of a panel of judges from companies that sponsored the event. (You will find a detailed report in the next issue of the newsletter). This year a total of five universities competed in the presence of the heads of student chapters who were also invited to Prague. This provided an excellent opportunity for youth representatives and senior geoscientists to sit together after the competition and talk about their expectations and proposals for further collaboration. After an exchange of views lasting little more than an hour we left the room agreeing to the following steps:
- A face to face meeting is extremely efficient and important, even in the age of unlimited communication opportunities in cyber space.
- Student chapters will inform the President of the Region in a monthly report of the important events within and around their respective student chapter.
- To open the door to participation of more universities in the IBA, the AAPG European Region, in collaboration with HQ, will offer special courses for universities covering specific IBA contest-related topics which are currently not represented in the curricula of the respective universities.
- The European Region is going to develop the occasion of the annual European Qualification Round of the IBA into an annual meeting of students and student chapters, providing a regular meeting (“recruitment fair”) bringing together students and recruitment officials of the companies.
- The student chapters are going to submit a proposal to the European Region comprising a list of recommended field trip conferences throughout the continent.
Thus we concluded very fruitful and effective meetings and discussions in March.
The implementation of these initiatives will need the support of all the membership, continued communication and last but not least a firm commitment to do our best for the revitalisation and growth of the Association.
I invite you to join in this important work.
István Bérczi
President AAPG
European Region