The university of Krakow has about 250 students in the geoscience program, including undergrads and MSc students, as well as a few PhD’s. At ION GX Technology in London, where I’m based, we have two PhD alumni from Krakow, so I know that they produce high quality graduates! The evening of my arrival, I was met at the airport by Dawid Szafranski, Maja, and Alicja, who spirited me off to a dinner of many Pierogi’s plus too much beer at an old city centre pub afterwards, where we were joined by fellow students on the SEG organizing committee, Beata and Tymon.  The talk was to be held first thing in the morning, so we had to debate whether to just keep drinking right through the night until the talk in the morning, or to wimp-out and get some sleep first. Age having long since caught up with me, I opted for the latter. The student population here speak excellent English, so no need for translation for the 60 or so students in attendance.

Tuesday Afternoon:

When I initially arrived in Kiev on Sunday with a long stopover awaiting the connecting flight to Ivano-Frankivsk, I was met by Zhenya Ustenko, one of the PhD students at Kiev Univ, and we went into the city for lunch prior to me catching my ongoing flight. Returning on Tuesday morning,  I was met by Prof. Pavlo Gryshchuk, who hosted my presentation, along with the deputy dean of Geology, Iryna Baysarovych. There are about 500 students in the faculty of geological sciences (including some who study via correspondence), and for geophysics itself, about 50 undergraduates, 30 MSc, and 5 PhD students. For the SEG talk, about 50 people were in attendance, with Zhenya undertaking the exhausting task of translating my talk, and then joining us for lunch afterwards (and yes… lunch included ‘Chicken Kiev’!).

Tuesday Evening:

Following the talk at the university, Zhenya accompanied me to the other side of Kiev to the Tutkovsky Institute, which specialises in further geoscience education for professionals. The talk there was attended by some 50 people, including a large contingent from the local seismic contractor the NADRA Group. The evening ended with a very pleasant traditional Ukrainian dinner with Zhenya, along with Dr Georgiy Lisny from the NADRA Group and Ganna Liventseva, the General Director of the Tutkovsky Institute: and, as expected, the tradition extended to multiple toasts, each of which was accompanied by a hefty dose of spirits!

Photo Courtesy of Sergey Yaskevich

I was met at the airport by Yuriy Ivanov, a second year MSc student at the university, who later that evening introduced me to Sergey Yaskevich (a very musically inclined PhD student), who would be doing the live-translation of my talk. The student group was the liveliest to-date, making me feel really welcome. The first evening following my arrival late into Novosibirsk, we met some of the local SEG-chapter organising committee members (Yuriy, Anna, Sergey, a second Anna, Pavel, and Dmitriy) and the second evening they took me to an ‘unusual’ jazz performance at a local restaurant. The university here has produced several luminaries in our industry, including Vladimir Gretchka, Evgeny Landa, and Sergey Fomel, so the students have a notable tradition to build upon.  The talk was introduced by Prof. Ivan Koulakov, who works on ray-based tomography, and the attendance was over 70 persons, with several coming from local geophysical contractors and research institutes. A few of the people coming from outside the university did not speak English, so the talk had to be translated. This was the first of such translations, which unfortunately does make things more difficult, as whereas a 1 hour lecture is OK in terms of attention span, and general comfort, a translated presentation (which typically doubles the time), will far exceed most people’s attention span. Also, it very tiring work for the translator, so my thanks to Sergey for a fine job keeping up with me.

Photo Courtesy of Anton Pavlov

After arrival in Moscow airport, I took the train into the city (a 45 minute express journey), only to be reassuringly informed by the automated voice message on boarding the train, that guns and explosives were not permitted onboard (now they tell me). I was met at the Paveletskiy train station by Anton Pavlov, a PhD student at the Gubkin Institute in Moscow, who accompanied me to dinner. The Institute was home to Riabinkin, who in the 1950’s became one of the founders of stereotomography. Today, the institute has about 80 undergrad students spread over its 4-year geoscience programme, as well as perhaps 15 MSc students in each of the 2 years of that course, plus a few PhDs. Similar numbers are also present for the two other main academic streams of geological and well-logging studies. The talk the next day was introduced by Valeriy Ryzhkov, the head of the geophysics group, and the audience comprised some 60 geoscientist and students, including Anatoloy Tikhonov an ex colleague from CGG, and Alexey Nosov, a colleague from LarGeo, with whom ION GXT have a JV in Russia. The questions were diverse, and difficult to answer due to their philosophical nature… e.g. can we guaranteed convergence in an inverse problem? Or, can we invert surface seismic data meaningfully with waveform inversion, in the absence of well control?

The local geophysical society in  Ankara is centred around the state oil company, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, and my host for the visit was Asaf Timur Kutlu (who I got to know over dinner at a local restaurant, the evening before the talk). TPAO sponsors about 20 geology and 20 geophysics students each year to undertake a 2-year MSc program in an America university (typically at Colorado School of Mines, Stanford, or one of the Houston area schools). Hence the audience included some 15 undergrad students who are currently studying for their TOEFL and GRE tests ready for next fall’s grad-school intake. Prior to the SEG talk, Timur hosted a lunch for about 10 TPAO staff and 10 of the students, at a local restaurant that served traditional Turkish food: very nice!

The audience for the talk itself comprised some 85 participants, including the student group, and the questions were diverse, ranging from the influence of migration approximation of what maximum offset can be ‘correctly’ processed, to when 4D effects are dominated by density rather than velocity. As with answering most such questions, I just make it up as I go along, but hopefully had something helpful to say. The issues concerning the student group related primarily to where they should study, and which faculty member they should seek-out as a supervisor: but apart from generalities, I couldn’t help with those concerns!

The afternoon concluded with Mr. Metin Altay, President of the Chamber of Geophysical Engineers of Turkey, presenting me with a beautiful memento of my visit.

As ION GX Technology have a lot of business in India, I usually attend this conference anyway, and was presenting a paper on some recent work I’d done (looking at velocity dispersion below gas hydrate bodies) – otherwise the SPG Hyderabad meeting would not have been a stop on the SEG European lecture tour. Consequently, in addition to my technical paper, and at the gracious invitation of the current president of the SPG, Mr. Apurba Saha (Executive Director, ONGC), I also got to present the SEG HL material. As there had been a few pre-conference courses by various well-known industry figures, the audience contained a surprising number of familiar faces, such as Brian Russell, Sam Gray, Julien Meunier, Rob Stewart, Rob Vestrum, Sergio Grion, and Dr. C. Mehta (somehow, I didn’t think they’d come all that way just to listen to me!). Sam was also presenting his SEG Distinguished lecture that day, so I got to listen-in on his talk as well -  most enjoyable too!

Picture Courtesy of Danielle Martensson

For my talk, I had my largest audience to-date, the room being packed with some 170 attendees, standing room only, and the 30 minutes of questions were diverse and extensive. Unfortunately, with hindsight, I think I answered one incorrectly, as the chap was asking about RTM in a land environment… I answered speaking  of algorithmic details, but it was later pointed-out to me that he was probably concerned about poor sampling in land environments for shot-based algorithms. Sometimes the language differences make it difficult to discern the gist of a question, but you still feel badly for not having addressed their intended query.

Unlike some other industrial conferences, the SPG encourages groups of school students to visit the exhibition, so we had some fun trying to explain what on earth it is we do, to a very diverse audience! Hopefully their enthusiasm follows through to bringing some of them into our industry.

Photo Courtesy of Danielle Martensson

The SEG lecture in India was scheduled for the SPG meeting in Hyderabad, but as I had planned to visit Cairn in Delhi anyway, I gave a rendition of the talk to about 15 of their G&G staff in their offices in Gurgaon, as several of them were not planning on attending the SPG conference later that week. The question period dealt more with migration theory than anything else, as clarifying the differences between algorithms such as beam, Kirchhoff, & RTM is usually of interest.

Following a long Scottish tradition, this university specialises in engineering and science, as suggested by the name. The Petroleum Geosciences Institute is for post-graduate students only, with some 300 MSc students and just under 100 PhDs. My host was Prof. Colin MacBeth, who is well known in the field of rock physics aspects of reservoir monitoring (time lapse) seismic. Unfortunately, the majority of the MSc students could not make it to the talk due to conflicting course schedules,  but the attendance was good anyway (about 40) with perhaps a dozen or so from various seismic contractors having driven the 2 hours from Aberdeen to attend (including some old colleagues from my CGG days). Following the lecture, there were about 20 minutes of questions, the nature of which were quite different from during my other lectures – perhaps due to having engineering and rock physics types in the audience!

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with Prof. Roger Clark at Leeds University, supervising students on their 1-year industrial geophysical MSc program, so the group there, and some of the local ale-houses, are well known to me, courtesy of Roger’s guided tours. On this visit, Roger asked me to supplement the SEG HL lecture with an overview of advanced migration schemes, so the first hour of so was spent on outlining the principles of shot migration, their imaging conditions, and more specifically RTM. This was then followed by the SEG lecture itself. The geophysics MSc program at Leeds is perhaps the best established and long-lived course of its kind in the UK, thanks to Roger’s guiding hand. In recent years, there have typically been about 30-35 MSc student on the geophysics course, in addition to perhaps 20 or so undergrad students following various flavours of geosciences. The talk was attended by about 50 students and staff, some of whom convened in the local pub afterwards, before we headed off for a mandatory curry.

Photo Courtesy of Prof. Roger Clark

As with most UK universities, there is a large percentage of non-EU students attending, who pay high fees as a lucrative income source for the university. Of the 30 or so students on the MSc, typically about 55% are from the UK, 5% from other EU countries and 40% non-EU. For my employer, ION GX Technology in the UK, the University of Leeds is one of our main sources of high quality new graduate recruits, so the intake of bright UK high-school students into the undergraduate courses, or of BSc’s into the Masters programme is of very real interest to us. The tendency for high school students to avoid the tougher subjects such as maths and physics, or for science graduates to be tempted in to the higher paying sector of the finance industry, is an issue.  (And unfortunately, there’s still a lot of political nonsense in the education field, telling students that all courses are of equal value: they only find out the hard-way that this is untrue, when they try to find a job).

Similarly at Imperial College, London, from where we also recruit MSc students, there is also a preponderance of non-UK or EU students in the MSc programs. On the three geoscience 1-year MSc courses run at ICL, each of which has about 50 students per year, some 60% are non UK or EU (with only 30% being UK nationals). For industry in the UK, who are constrained by immigration and labour laws not to hire non-UK or EU citizens into starting jobs, this poses the usual problems associated with a skills shortage.. Conversely, on the ICL geoscience undergrad courses (some 200 students spread over 4 years) about 85% are UK, and 10% are EU students, but as an industry, we prefer the MSc intake, as they have focussed more on ‘what we do’.

The high numbers of non-UK or EU students is again indicative of how higher education is a big ‘export business’ for the UK. A risk with this strategy is to squeeze-out the UK & EU students who may face very high fees, in favour of fully-funded high-fee paying overseas students. Conversely, as with the NTNU in Norway, which does not rely on high-fee paying overseas students to underwrite its programs, the University of Delft, in the Netherlands, has a very high proportion of indigenous and other EU students (some 75-85% on its undergrad and MSc programs).

Again, this event was graciously hosted by the local oil company, with about 30 participants from the local geoscience contracting and university community, and perhaps another 35 from Maersk. The event was arranged here by two friends (and ex-colleagues), Pierre Lanfranchi (ex-CGG) and Alex Calvert (ex-GXT). Apparently, the majority of those present were not involved in seismic processing related topics in their day-to-day work, so for them the talk was covering relatively unknown ground. However, they were eventually rewarded for their perseverance and feigned wakefulness with coffee, Danish pastries, chocolates and sweets courtesy of Maersk (but sadly, it was left to me to finish off the leftover chocolates….). The evening ended very pleasantly with dinner with Pierre and Alex.