Working in the far North
Tobias Giesgen – Graduate Programm in Norway
His time at RWTH Aachen began for Tobias, or mostly called Tobi, in 2012 with a bachelor's degree in physics. After two semesters, he moved to the Department of Geosciences and Geography and completed his Bachelor's degree in Georesource Management (GRM) in 2016. Early in his bachelor's degree, Tobi developed a great interest in geophysics, which then led him to study Applied Geophysics (AGP) in Delft, Zurich and Aachen (2016-2018).
Immediately after completing his master's degree, Tobi moved to Oslo, Norway, where he completed an internship for Equinor. In the "Data Science and Analytics" department for the exploration of oil and gas, he was able to apply his master's thesis learned knowledge of machine learning with Python in practice. Tobi completed his thesis at the Institute of Computational Geoscience and Reservoir Engineering with Prof. Florian Wellmann Ph.D. in the application of Unsupervised Machine Learning to geophysical borehole data. At the institute, they also used virtual reality to present and explore geomodels. Tobi was allowed to use the technique after work in his free time, which was one of the highlights of his studies and was a lot of fun.
The biggest hurdles in his studies were the exam phases. Tobi thinks that the exams are possible with a little diligence, but above all due to the tight timing of the exams it can get tight.
After falling in love with both Norway and working for Scandinavia's largest energy company during his internship, Tobi started the Graduate Programme (GP) at Equinor in April 2019. There, in his first of three positions of the GP, he planned geophysical measurements of the seabed to build new wind farms in Poland, England and Japan. He often had the opportunity to represent Equinor as a "Vessel Representative" on the measuring ships and was thus able to gain exciting insights into the "offshore" life. After weeks on the ship, Tobi devotes himself mainly to nature in Norway and enjoys it while fishing or hiking.
Since September 2020, Tobi has been at the Digital Center of Excellence, where he will be working on the digital technologies of the future. For example, his department is testing the capabilities of Microsoft HoloLenses to improve safety on oil rigs. Much of his current work is focused on robots and drones and how they can independently take on repair and control tasks. In June 2021 he will finish the GP and from summer Equinor will again look for up to 150 graduates for the coming year in all areas, from renewable energies to classic oil and gas, to business and project management.
Other geostudents would give Tobi the advice to enjoy the Bachelor's degree and not worry too much if a exam went wrong. After that you can do in the Master what you are really interested in and give full throttle. After all, geo-study at RWTH has the special appeal that there are many possibilities for deepening. In the first semesters you get to know many topics that you haven't heard of before and can then specialize in some of them later.