If you like the outdoors, you have limited choices for occupations that pay more than minimum wage; various flavors of agriculture, field biology/botany, and geology are pretty much it. In geology, that’s fine until you get married and have a couple of kids. Then your spouse starts bugging you about always being off in some swamp, jungle, tundra, or desert for months on end. So all the outdoors types suddenly want desk jobs. Alas, there aren’t that many in geology and that competition depresses salaries.
This was brought home to me one night in the Hay River Hotel lounge. I was talking to a guy working for a major oil company. He was exploration manager for Northwestern Canada and Alaska (prior to finding the Prudhoe Bay bonanza). He had about a hundred people working for him and had a budget into seven figures. It turned out I was getting paid more than he was because I was getting a $16/day hardship bonus. Oops. Time to go back to school and shift gears. While I was not a big fan of deer flies, poisonous frogs, and sunshine, I did have my regrets because I still feel geology is the most challenging of the sciences.
In ‘69 I went back to school. I was at the right place at the right time. The Naval Architecture Department was trying to change its warmonger image, so it renamed itself the Ocean Engineering Department. There was one small problem, though: Nobody on the faculty knew anything about oceans. Two of my friends were on the faculty and they approached me to design a course, teach it, and write a book. In return, I got a research job and could register in the degree program. Since I had GI Bill benefits coming, that was a good deal. I took all business, operations research, and computer courses, which created a problem. Since I only took one course in the Ocean Engineering Department, taught by one of my friends, the Dean baulked at issuing the degree from the Department. So my MS reads “Without Specification.”
Thus I cast aside my geology career to become a Software Guy. (I had done a program in ‘57 on a plug board, but that was such a character building experience that I didn’t go back to software until FORTRAN was mainstream in the late ‘60s, when I did my dog track handicapping program. But that’s another story…)
However, those years did provide me with some valuable experience. One was public speaking. Geoscience sent me off to the international meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists to deliver a paper in the late ‘60s (‘68 I think). When I was in the wings getting introduced, I couldn’t see the audience. When I walked out on that stage I got one of the major shocks of my life. The auditorium was huge with two balconies and it was SRO. I had no idea there were that many geophysicists in the entire world! I managed to stammer through the presentation and since that baptism by fire, I’ve never had a problem with public speaking.
An interesting sidebar to that paper was that the SEG asked us to provide a written version for their journal. When I delivered the paper, there were three authors: Keeva Vozoff, the technical guru; Arnold Orange, the project manager; and myself, the field guy. Keeva said he would do the write-up. However, shortly after that Keeva got laid off. He was apparently annoyed about that and when the paper appeared in the journal, only his name was on it. Keeva went to Australia, which was a good thing because I probably would have popped the SOB with my prospector’s pick.