UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State alum Beth Stump boarded a helicopter in Louisiana that buzzed across the Gulf of Mexico and landed on an oil drilling platform in the middle of the sea. There was no turning back — She was now a geoscientist.
“Here I am a relatively recent college graduate with a meteorology degree and the next thing you know I’m on a helicopter going to a Pennzoil production platform,” Stump said. “The whole thing was kind of surreal. I remember telling my mother I was going to do it and she said, ‘where are you going to sleep — are you going back to shore every night?’”
Since that opportunity more than 25 years ago, Stump has carved out a career as a geoscientist working for the largest energy companies in the world. Today, she is the global geological and geophysical manager at Chevron, overseeing subsurface characterization support for the planning, design and drilling of oil and gas wells across the world.
But her path may have taken decidedly different turns if not for a single chat with former Penn State President Eric Barron, who was at the time director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) — the precursor to the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.
“I was an undergrad and the only way I could afford to stay in my apartment over the summer and not go home was if I had a job and could pay rent,” Stump said. “In a rare moment of boldness, I walked into ESSC and asked the admin if I could have a minute with Dr. Barron because I had a question.”
Stump introduced herself, said she was interested in the work the center was doing on climate modeling and wondered if she could be a help as a summer intern.
“He said yes on the spot,” Stump said. “As I was leaving, he asked what my major was. I said meteorology and he said, ‘oh good, that will come in handy.’”
After graduation, and in part thanks to the experience gained from her internship, Stump got a job as a technologist with Peter Flemings, then a professor of geosciences at Penn State, who was working on a large project with industry to drill a well in the Gulf of Mexico and investigate why a field over a fault zone had been overproducing.
For Stump, it meant flying down to Louisiana and boarding a helicopter for an offshore oil platform.
“It was a tremendous experience and I thought ‘wow, I don’t know if there is anything cooler than getting to drill wells and figure out if you are right,’” Stump said. “You have this geologic hypothesis, and you are going to gather data and figure out if you are right and then you are going to apply that knowledge to future operations.”
Inspired and seeking to make a career of doing science, Stump enrolled in graduate school to study geosciences at Penn State. She said she found like-minded individuals as she got to know the scientists and engineers who worked in industry.
“They weren’t just cogs in a corporate machine,” she said. “All of the industry geologists I interacted with when I was at Penn State were really interesting characters. They knew about lots of different things and maintained their individuality. They were very much still scientists.”
And so, after graduating in 1998, Stump took a job at Texaco as a development geologist in the Gulf of Mexico shelf field. She joined Chevron when the companies merged in 2001 and has been with the company — doing science — ever since.
“My work has afforded me the opportunity to travel the world,” she said. “It’s been a great opportunity for me to interact with lots of different people who don’t necessarily look like me or sound like me and I’ve enjoyed it very much. That’s why I want to come back to Penn State to talk to students about what’s possible and introduce them to career paths that may not be on their radar screens."
Today, Stump leads the geosciences external Penn State alumni advisory board and serves as Chevron’s executive sponsor to the University.
“It’s been exciting coming to really understand the full breadth of the interactions we have with Penn State and trying to encourage more partnerships between Chevron and the University,” she said. “I think Penn State has a lot to offer and Chevron has a lot to offer, in terms of introducing folks to the energy transition and all the ways people can get involved.”
It’s an exciting time in the energy industry, as companies like Chevron focus on the need to develop lower carbon solutions, Stump said.
“What I tell geosciences students is we need them to be part of the solution,” Stump said. “Pretty much everything you can think of requires some sort of geoscience knowledge and understanding — certainly carbon storage and utilization, certainly geothermal and even hydrogen storage — as well as critical minerals required for all these EV [electric vehicle] batteries. We certainly have a part to play.”