14 wife, Martha, is still teaching over at OSU Chemistry and enjoying about 300 undergrads per semester. His son, Maclain, is ten now and is already over 5 foot tall…trouble. Dr. Mary Hileman Visiting Assistant Professor; Sedimentology; Petroleum Geology The 2015-2016 school year marks my eighth year as a faculty member of the Boone Pickens School of Geology. I started teaching one course each semester in the Spring of 2009 and began teaching fulltime in the spring of 2011. I am now a Visiting Assistant Professor with responsibility for teaching 5 courses each year. My primary teaching responsibility is to be the Geology faculty link to the Minor in Petroleum Engineering. I wrote and taught the initial required course for the Minor: GEOL 3413 – Petroleum Geology for Engineers, based on my 14 years of experience in the petroleum industry. This practical course begins with mineral and rock identification and ends with a group term project presentation that recommends drilling 3 infill wells, giving project reserves, ROI evaluation and terms for participation in the project. Class size for this course has followed oil prices and employment trends in the industry. I taught this course once a year starting in the fall of 2009 (15 students) and fall of 2010 (16 students). Beginning with the fall 2011 through fall 2014, this course was taught every semester with an average enrollment of 23 students. In the fall of 2014, projections by the School of Engineering anticipated enrollments of 100 or more students each academic year. In fact, enrollment ballooned in 2015, with 46 students in the spring and 44 students in the fall semester. However, when the oil price dropped below $35 per barrel, enrollment for the Spring semester 2016 dropped from 44 to 18 students in one semester. With the oil price currently below $30 per barrel, with Engineering concurring, our plan is to return to offering this course once a year in the fall semester. The second Geology sequence course offered to Petroleum Engineering students is GEOL 4323 – Advanced Well Log Analysis for Engineers. This course was first offered to Engineering students who completed GEOL 3413, in the Spring 2010. I started teaching this course in the spring 2013 with 27 engineering students. There were 35 students enrolled in both the spring of 2014 and 2015. With a projected enrollment of 90 students who had completed GEOL 3413 in the prior spring and fall, offering this course only once a year would result in an impossibly large class size. Therefore, it was decided to offer this course in the fall semester as well as in the spring. Dr. Gary Stewart kindly agreed to teach this course in the fall 2015, with an anticipated enrollment of 46; however, only 22 students enrolled. This spring (2016) there are 36 students enrolled out of the 44 who completed GEOL 3413 in fall 2015. With a low enrollment of 22 students this fall in GEOL 3413, we project that this course again will be offered only once a year in the spring term. Historically GEOL 4323 and GEOL 5353, Advanced Well Log Analysis for graduate Geology students are offered at the same time – once a week for 3 hours in the evening for lecture, discussion and problem solving. Topics in GEOL 4323/5353 cover evaluation of both the standard suite of vertical hole wireline well logs, introduction to petrophysical evaluation, as well as modern microimaging logs run in lateral boreholes, and current BPSG research about unconventional reservoirs. In response to comments from several graduate students enrolled in GEOL 5353 last spring, who were disappointed that the graduate homework assignments were not more rigorous, this spring, in addition to the regular homework assignments, graduate students have four additional and more challenging homework problems. These include: (1) recognition of an overturned and faulted fold (correlation problem), (2) proper Gamma Ray Shale Volume (Vsh) calculation of a glauconiterich sandstone, (3) porosity evaluation of an oomoldic carbonate reservoir, and (4) a short paper to define expected log curve responses to natural fractures in a carbonate reservoir. I also teach GEOL 4313 – Introduction to Well Log Analysis for undergraduate Geology majors (spring semester). This course covers the fundamentals of standard wireline log interpretation to solve subsurface problems. Because this class meets twice a week, there is time for discussion and practice of techniques. This semester there are 11 students enrolled in the course, who all have completed GEOL 4023 – Petroleum Geology (Dr. Puckette). This means that this semester the class is primarily a seminar that integrates the student’s knowledge of petroleum concepts with specific wireline log interpretation. Finally, I teach GEOL 3043 – Geology of the National Parks in the fall semester. This basic Geology course continues to be a popular elective for Junior and Senior nonscience majors. The focus for this course is to learn and understand basic geologic concepts using 22 of the U. S. National Parks as examples. There were 39 students enrolled in this class last fall. The plan is to take the National Parks course online in the fall of 2016. I currently am the Thesis Advisor for 2 Masters students and I am a member of an additional 8 Master’s Thesis Committees.
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