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EDUCATION:  Clements High School - 2000 University of Texas at Austin, BS in Petroleum Engineering

My favorite memory from college was discovering my passion for completions engineering. I held summer internship positions with Total and BP in production, drilling, and completions operations teams. My internship experiences and petroleum engineering classes (especially Dr. Mukul Sharma's classes) led me to pursue completions engineering, which I found to be an exciting blend of operational and reservoir engineering. I began my career with BP planning and executing hydraulically fractured completions in the Rockies. The last ten years of my career, however, have been spent specializing in deepwater sand control and other complex completions globally, but primarily in the Gulf of Mexico. My work has included offshore execution, completion design, and sandface and wellbore modeling. In my latest role at ConocoPhillips, I have the privilege to work alongside industry-known experts in our Global Wells team, designing and trouble-shooting complex completions worldwide. Receiving the SPE scholarship prompted me to contact the petroleum engineering departments at my potential universities. I received further scholarship offers from the universities, and learned more about the oil and gas industry and what it could uniquely offer to my future career. As fourth generation "oilfield trash", as my family kindly referred to me, I was no stranger to the industry, but meeting Susan Howes provided me with my first image of a female petroleum engineer and influenced my decision to major in petroleum engineering. The advice I would give to SPE-GCS scholarship students would be to have an open mind to the breadth of career opportunities in the oil and gas industry. There are so many unique roles, so be sure to find something you love. My colleagues who have been the most successful and the happiest in their careers are the ones who have found that niche that excites and challenges them. Contact me at sarah.e.dobbs@cop.com.