Q: As a founding member, could you give the details of the newly formed Kuala Lumpur AAPG YP Chapter and your part in its formation?
A: After attending the World Gas Conference and other petroleum conferences, I realized there is a lack of platforms for geoscience young professionals to network. As I observe typically during the major conference, most of the social networking events are exclusive for senior management. Hence, I decided to form the AAPG Young Professional for KL Chapter. I believe this is the first professional body solely formed to serve the needs of all geoscience young professionals and students in Malaysia. As the current president of this new chapter, I currently work with 15 committee members who hail different oil companies. My main role is to lead my team to plan and coordinate all networking activities, visiting geoscientist talks and field trips for the geoscience young professionals and students.
Q: What are the roles/goals of the YP Chapter and what do you hope to accomplish?
A: Our main goal is to be the platform that serves the need for university geoscience students and young professional geoscientists (less than 10 years working experience) to learn, network and eventually create a successful career for themselves in the energy business. Most importantly, we want to build an understanding of the value of a lasting relationship between AAPG and young professional members. Basically, KL AAPG YP offers endless opportunities for networking, career guidance, learning, and enhancing professional competence by organizing events. We plan to organise more events such as Visiting Geoscientist Talks, networking events, fundraising events and YP career talks for the university geoscience students.
Q: How excited are the young professionals in embracing the chapter?
A: After organizing three visiting geoscientist talks for our group – consisting of more than 50 geoscientists from multinational companies, independent companies and service companies – yes, we definitely see a positive response and excitement from the young professional geoscience community in Kuala Lumpur. In fact, this is the only professional body that addresses the needs of this specific young professional geoscientist age group and also serves as a link for the geoscience university students.
Q: Could you describe your personal experience in being active in the chapter? How do you benefit from the participation?
A: So far, I have personally coordinated the VGP talk for Liaw Kim Kiat with Saudi Aramco and Herman Darman with Shell Netherlands. Fortunately, we managed to invite these highly experienced experts (at least 30 years’ experience) to share their working experience in carbonate reservoir, Middle East and Caspian Sea to the young professionals to further enhance their technical skill. They generously shared their useful technical workflow, work issues and also any common mistakes made. It was a very fruitful learning process for us young professionals as it is impossible to get any learning opportunities like this if our company doesn’t operate in this region of the world. It was a great learning discussion together as well after the talk ends.
Q: What is your advice to young geoscience professionals out there?
A: My personal advice for young geoscience professionals is to never stop learning and always be active with a professional body such as AAPG to enhance your learning opportunities and to network with more people. Most of the time, when you face technical problems with your work, you are more likely to find an expert with the right solution if you’re able to tap into the huge network circle of geoscience friends, such as the huge geoscience community of AAPG, which is located worldwide.