Sea Speed here's my story. I'm not sharing this to try to boast/brag about my social status, I just feel like I perfectly fit the description of what a lot of these experienced folks are trying to describe.
Graduated HS in 2011, top 10%, 1990 on the SAT, A&M legacy that got into PETE with no problem. I had no idea which engineering I wanted to do when I was applying, just through google searches and articles and salaries, Petroleum and Chemical were the 2 that attracted me best. My cousin was a veteran that went to A&M after like 5-6 years of overseas, went into PETE (graduated in '10) and had internships galore, a nice entry level with a major immediately after graduation, told me Petroleum was awesome. My parents were invested in my future and were showing me articles my junior year of highschool about how North Dakota couldn't find enough people to come up there and work because the industry was booming beyond what those states could supply talent wise (my parents and I didn't even know wtf the Bakken Shale was).
Fast forward to 2015, graduating in PETE with a 3.2 GPA, and a couple of internships... and no real career post graduation really until mid to late 2017. Felt like a failure for the first time in my life for a couple of years there.
Now 2018-2021 has been the wildest, up and down journey ever. My initial team was made up of 9 people. In that 3.5 year time span, my boss that hired me was let go, 2 of those 9 were "let go" in a voluntary early retirement separation, and another 3 of those 9 were laid off in 2020. Take into mind all 6 of them survived 3 RIF's in the 3 years before I even started with the company. Not only that but we even went in and out of bankruptcy in 2020.
I'm 28 and have been lucky to make a boatload of money in these past 3 years. Bought a new car and already paid it off last year. No student loans anymore. My friends can't believe my salary and tell me they would kill to get a job with my company.... meanwhile I have no freakin clue what my future will hold even maybe just 3 months from now. I'm scared to do anything with my money, scared to buy a house, the car was bought out of necessity rather than a want, I tell my girlfriend I want to be cautious with my savings (while having literally 25x what she has), etc. etc... My company just posted a position, and I now have peers from my PETE graduating class that I barely talked to and have incredible qualifications that are reaching out to me to ask if they can put me as a reference on their application. I think I have been like the 5th or 6th youngest person in the company literally since I started. Just typing all of this has me reminiscing on how crazy and uncertain these past 2 years have been. Outside of the industry, I've been involved with the TMF with my own contributions now instead of my family's. About 2 months into Bjork getting hired I went to a luncheon and talked to him for about 30 minutes, I told him what I did and how back in college I made a spreadsheet that I could update every day that literally calculated A&M basketball's RPI (this is where the data analytics you've been seeing countless times in this thread start to come into play). Bjork told Dabney he should hire me with the TMF and his reply was literally "He's a Petroleum Engineer, we can't afford him..." It was very humbling, but at the same time in the back of my mind I would literally rather take probably a 50% paycut to get in with A&M athletics just to get rid of all of this uncertainty I've had to deal with in my career and get into something I'm incredibly passionate about.
Like I said, you've seen big data quite a lot recently in this thread. Sports data analytics has always been more of a hobby with me than an interest. I love the hell out of moneyball and things like RPI and BCS formulas. Like I said, I had an engineering mindset but no oil & gas background in my childhood. I put that spreadsheet as an "achievement" on my resume, pulled it up in the interview and my boss (who was lucky enough to be an Aggie basketball fan himself) loved it and thought it was perfect in what they were looking for in the position. Fastforward to now, I've been looking into every one of these bootcamps and master's programs other posters have been posting because that is something I would easily see myself getting into, enjoying the hell out of, and being comfortable with a paycut just to take out the ongoing job security anxiety I have every other week because of every $5 swing with the oil price. Even if the job had nothing to do with sports, I would love to make bada$$ spotfire or BI dashboards for a living. I've never really thought about an MBA, because I still think my degree would govern how other industries viewed that MBA as just an add-on to my PETE degree.... but in my mind that Data Analytics degree is something that they will view as my way to get out of oil and gas and into something more stable.
So, sorry for the 30 minute Ted talk, but that is my story Sea Speed. The leftist government policies have never been in my mind, except for that brief 2 weeks after Biden got elected. They don't really affect my company luckily... Instead, as Comeback and others have been alluding to, the ongoing uncertainty has just been destroying my anxiety and leaving me unsure of what to do with my money and relationships for 5 years now.
