Geophysical Ninja

Since this thread was started in May and it is now December, I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't need any additional help. However, I thought that I would post this for anyone else who may have similar questions in the future. I am a Ph.D. student at a Tier 1 university (currently in absentia), and I am currently working in the oil and gas industry as a geophysicist. A great school like Columbia should allow a student to get into the oil industry even if there is no direct focus on the industry for their research. However, (and I have friends that can attest to this) it can be somewhat more difficult to get through the front door. At a typical oil focused school, the ease of getting employment into the oil industry is dramatically easier. This is simply a huge advantage if that is your goal. After leaving from a large oil school with an M.S., I had more than over a dozen offers (granted the oil prices were high then). However, my friends at great academically focused schools had a much more difficult time (some never got any offers despite their best efforts). That being said, I believe that name and pedigree of a school are meaningless as a Ph.D. student (they only seem to matter to the uneducated). Who you study with and what you do matters more than where you went to school. For geophysics, this OP mentions Standford who are the leaders in rock physics and imaging, CSM's CWP is top notch as well, and UT has a great program (e.g. Texas Consortium for Computational Seismology). The University of Oklahoma is a leader in industry orientated interpretation. The University of Houston has some amazing people there as well in rock physics, interpretation, and especially AVO work. The point here is that each of these programs has equal strengths in different areas for the oil industry. Which school I decided to go with was a function of the type of research that I wanted to do. My advice is basically if you don't know what discipline you are interested in then consider an M.S. first. You don't want to go to a great school with a focus on imaging when you really should have done rock physics. I have personally worked with individuals at each of these programs, and they are all equally impressive. There are great, smart people everywhere, but what they focus on is significantly different, and it is heavily influenced by where they went to university.