UTPB PetroBowl team pleased with showing at contest
The annual North America PetroBowl Regional Qualifier was held Feb. 20-22 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in February. The competition itself was just one day, but it was part of a three-day conference called the 2025 North American Student Symposium.
UTPB junior Bryan Martinez said the contest involved "a bunch of petroleum-based facts in the oil field, related to drilling, reservoir, even health and safety questions."
It's a quiz-show type of format similar to Jeopardy, said Martinez and fellow team member Agnes Sjursaether.
Martinez is the vice president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers student chapter at UTPB and Sjursaether is the communications and outreach chair.
The students said the university has sent a team to the competition before, but it has been several years.
Along with Martinez and Sjursaether, a junior, the team included Leonardo Gamez, Benjamin Patterson and Jonathan King.
"We just wanted to try a new opportunity and try to compete against other students from other universities," Martinez said.
Sjursaether said she thought it was interesting to see what they were learning compared to students at larger schools.
"We placed third in our bracket. ... There's like five brackets, and they take two from each bracket, so we just missed. We just missed it by a couple points. We were very close, but we beat teams like New Mexico Mining Institute and Penn State," Martinez said.
Sjursaether said they lost to teams like Texas A&M University and University of Houston, but they sent their graduate students.
"We were very close to beating University of Houston," she added.
"I think they probably were thinking that it was going to be easy to beat a small school like UTPB," Sjursaether said.
Martinez and Sjursaether said the conference was also enjoyable.
Sjursaether added that they liked talking to students from other universities.
Martinez added that there were students from other universities in Canada and Mexico as well.
Sjursaether said this was the North American version of the event, but they are hosted throughout the world. The top four or five teams from every region qualify for the international competition in Houston in the fall.
"For sure we'll try again. It was a worthwhile experience," Martinez said.
Because they came so close, Sjursaether said they are more eager than ever to try again, especially to get to the international competition and getting to compete against schools from Europe and Asia.
Martinez said having to think on their feet was very beneficial.
Sjursaether said they had some good practices where they quizzed each other.
"I definitely feel like it has helped me in school in general, all the things I've learned from studying for this competition," she added.
Martinez said they practiced twice a week for two to three hours at a time.
It took them a while to get the practice material, so the team started getting ready fairly late.
Martinez and Sjursaether, who both want to pursue petroleum engineering careers, praised the engineering program at UTPB.
Martinez said he liked how tight-knit the engineering community is and that students can get close to the professors and ask them any questions.
Sjursaether added that she likes the petroleum engineering department in part because it's very stable.
"They don't switch professors that much, so we're all very close to our professors. We know them really well. ... They have an open-door policy so we can always stop by and ask questions, and they're always willing to help. ... I think we're also very lucky, because at bigger schools like Texas A&M, you have teacher assistants that teach the class, whereas here at UTPB, we have professors with actual PhDs that teach us everything," she added.
Sjursaether said she would encourage students considering UTPB to look into the petroleum engineering department.
"We have really great professors and a lot of great students that are willing to learn. We have SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers), too, and you can learn so much from that," she added.
The faculty advisor for the team was Associate Professor of petroleum engineering Ahmed Kamel.
"Our newly established UTPB team, which included only undergraduate students, participated in the North America PetroBowl Regional Qualifier. It was the first time for all of the team members," Kamel said.
He noted that the competition included teams from much older and larger schools where their teams included graduate students doing their master's and PhDs. Many of them had participated in the competition previously and maybe more than once.
"However, our team did very well and barely missed qualification to the international PetroBowl," Kamel said. "They played against Texas A&M, University of Houston, and Penn State. (The) UTPB team won Penn State and barely lost to both Texas A&M and University of Houston."
"For a newly established team with neither experience in the competition nor the equipment, I must admit that I am very proud of the team and I am sure with more support from both university and industry, (the) UTPB team can go further and can easily qualify (for) the international competition," he added.
"In addition, (the) opportunity (for) interaction and networking between our students and their peers from other schools, graduate and undergraduate, is invaluable," Kamel said.
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