About a week ago, the “East meets West” conference took place for the 8th time. It was organized by AGH University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Drilling, Oil and Gas as well as the AGH UST Student Chapter and was located in Krakow in Poland. The good reputation of the AGH University and the success of the EMW conference in previous years was already promising a great event.
Dozens of students from all over the world came to see and attend interesting and inspiring paper and poster presentations from different fields of study as well as different study levels. Entertaining Panel discussions about HSE aspects and women in O&G industry were held together with industry’s professionals. Several companies such as MOL Group, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes took their chance and came to present their companies and fields of business in an exciting career session. And last but not least there was this one quiz about petroleum industry – the regional PetroBowl Qualifier for Europe, North Sea, Russia and Caspian SPE Sections.
The arrival and welcome at the accommodation was well organized and the conference kicked off with a meet-and-greet session or simple said a pub-crawl in the city center of Krakow. On Tuesday, the first official day of the event more and more students arrived and the conference was opened by Mr. Stanislaw Nagy, representative of AGH university and Mr. Mathias Meister, SPE representative and regional director.
Later on, the first student paper contest for undergraduates started and several students presented their research work about various topics of technical and economic nature. As part of the contest, our colleague from SPE Student Chapter Oliver Spenger held a great presentation on Big Data in which he explained why less data is sometimes more. For his excellent performance, he was awarded with the second place. Congratulations Oliver!
On Wednesday morning, the preliminaries of the PetroBowl Qualifier were scheduled. Twenty teams had to compete against each other in head-to-head quiz rounds in order to reach the best 16. Six teams were already set for the next round due to good performance in the previous year. The team from Montanuniversität Leoben participated for the first time ever in the PetroBowl tournament and had to start off against Aberdeen University in their preliminary round. Ignoring mathematics here, every team was 150% motivated and the atmosphere was overwhelming. With a sound performance, our team won and went to the next round where University of Miskolc waited for them. After another win in the afternoon session, Leoben proceeded to the quarterfinals and finished its PetroBowl business for that day.
After a more or less short night out – priorities first – Leoben competed against Politecnico di Torino on Thursday afternoon. It was a thrilling match but in the end we won and qualified for the PetroBowl finals in San Antonio Texas. From there, all the pressure was gone and we had won dozens of fans already. In the semifinals, the last four teams competed against each other: Heriot Watt vs. AGH University & MU Leoben vs. Gubkin University. Additionally to those four teams, our friends from Stavanger University have qualified as well for the PetroBowl finals due to the Lucky Loser regulation. Congratulations!
With a solid performance, our colleagues managed to win against Gubkin University and made it to the final! In the other semifinal, AGH University defeated Heriot Watt University so that the final was made up of the host AGH University and our team from Leoben. The atmosphere was loaded