I am applying for A&M for 2016 spring I would really appreciate if someone could take some of their time and review my SOP. Thank you for your help!!! STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The types of challenges I thrive on are the ones that push me through an immense amount of both physical and mental struggles under constraints and give me a great sense of accomplishments. I learned this attitude from the last two years of active-duty military service. And I am thrilled to take the next challenge in my life, which is to advance my education to become a petroleum engineer, my ultimate goal and interest. With two more years remaining in the service, I strongly believe it is a timely decision to start my graduate school, consolidate my past academic experience, and expand my expertise in petroleum industry with the rigorous engineering program at the Texas A&M. Along with my military duties, I have no doubt that I will bring my best to your prestigious program and academic community. My research experience at the University of Texas at Austin was very fulfilling intellectually. In the beginning of my junior year at the UT Austin, Dr. Quoc Nguyen offered me a chance to join his research team as an undergraduate research assistant. Dr. Nguyen has a vast research experience in unconventional resources, enhanced oil recovery, and improved hydrocarbon production system. The project I was assigned to was also about unconventional resources and its prevalent production problems. I developed a predictive model for an asphaltene deposition on stainless steel metal by measuring concentration of each asphaltene sample through repetitive laboratory-scale experiments. Even though the flow loop experimental setting resulted in a laminar flow of oil due to its structural limitation, a variety of factors affecting the deposition was found: oil velocity, temperature, pump pressure, and concurrent forces affecting both erosion and deposition. This experiment helped me envision a bigger picture of the entire precipitation process along the pipeline from producing to refining stages under different circumstances. I would like to extend my knowledge and confidence I earned from this research at a graduate school level. Among the different research teams at the A&M, I found out that Dr. Berna Hasckir’s Heavy Oil, Oil Shales, Oil Sands& Carbonate Analysis and Recovery Methods (HOCAM) team carries out research on similar topics with my research interest, asphaltene deposition. With the ever increasing demand for massive bitumen production, I would like to expand my expertise on the broader subjects of oil sand recovery using thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods, especially on Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). After carefully reading Dr. Berna’s SPE published article on Expanding Solvent SAGD (ES-SAGD), I was amazed by its astounding positive results of hybrid and cyclic injection of both asphaltene non-solvent and solvent chemicals to bring eco-friendliness and economic feasibility. Since the success of ES-SAGD largely lies on the proper selection of solvent types, which is also dependent on the particular reservoir conditions, I desire to further research on various types of oil sand samples from different sets of reservoir environments. With my past research experience and frantic efforts, I am confident that I will eventually be able to conduct a research on such topics, find meaningful results, and become an academic worthy at the Texas A&M. Internship experience added another significant value on my career as an engineer. During my internship period with Daesung Energy Resources and Ray Oil Company, which are both strongly geology-oriented firms that focus on oil exploration and investment, I successfully performed well logging analysis and created correlation charts among wells that share similar petrophysical properties within a reservoir block. Close interactions with geologists allowed me to develop and improve skills in utilizing data from seismic logs and structural and isopach maps to understand how to evaluate economic potentiality of abandoned wells. Towards the end of my internship, I had a chance to visit Daesung’s first drilling site in Schleicher, Texas and learned how to correlate mud samples to the surrounding petrophysical condition of the reservoir. This field experience with petrophysicists and mud loggers, in addition to my previous research experience and engineering specialty, helped me gain a balanced knowledge between a theory and the practice of petroleum industry. Achieving my graduate degree at the Texas A&M will greatly enhance my expertise in petroleum engineering and enable me to continue pursuing my ultimate dream of becoming a knowledgeable and environment-friendly researcher and engineer. I look forward to meeting my ambitious academic goals with the Texas A&M’s well-known research foundations and faculties. After I complete my military service and join the Texas A&M’s petroleum engineering program as an on-campus student, I strongly wish to work with professors who carry out research on thermal EOR. With strong multidisciplinary skills from bachelor’s study and perseverance I have gained over the last two years in the service, I am fervently confident that I will succeed in your academically challenging and research-based graduate school. I truly believe the Texas A&M’s renowned distance learning program will be a solid steppingstone to my perpetual dream of becoming a petroleum engineer.
