My 15-year-old daughter came home from a school field trip the other day wielding a small bag with a well-known oil company name on the front. Inside were the kinds of “gimmes” that one would expect to get at a trade show — a small football, a fan, a pair of safety goggles festooned with logos.

It’s official — she’s being recruited to work in the oilpatch.

I must say I find this concept somewhat bemusing. It’s like the invisible wall that separates my personal life from my work life has become more flimsy, like I opened a copy of E&P and found last year’s Duey Christmas letter instead of this month’s Duey column. After all, we write a lot about the looming personnel shortage and what can be done, and increasingly the advice from many quarters is to start younger, to reach farther down into the school system to pique that interest in engineering or in earth science a few years earlier so that we’ll someday have a steady stream of graduates lining up to take our well-worn spots.

The field trip was, in fact, part of National Engineers Week, a formal coalition of more than 70 engineering, education and cultural societies along with 50 corporations and government agencies. The idea is to promote recognition among parents, teachers and students about the importance of a technical education and literacy in math, science and technology. In addition to this visit, other Engineering Week activities I was aware of included “Introduce a Girl to Engineering,” hosted by another major oil company, and the first annual Rice Student Engineering Competition at Rice University here in Houston.

I’m all about outreach and education. I think only good things can come from the oil industry promoting itself to students, not the least of which is a little spit shine on its badly tarnished reputation. I also think it’s a fascinating industry with a lot to offer.

But my daughter? Wow. If she was 7 years older and graduating in May with an engineering degree, she could probably have her choice of jobs and throw in a few perks at the same time. But some of us have long memories. Many working for large oil companies today joined in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Although they joined in similar boom times, it wasn’t long before takeover attempts, layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, post-merger “rightsizing,” etc., whittled their numbers considerably. And I lived through the brain drain in the mid- to late ’90s, when early retirements removed a generation of geoscientists that are sorely needed a decade later.

It’s not surprising, then, that more than a few grizzled survivors of this tough industry have told me that they’d never recommend it as a career path for their own kids.

But hope springs eternal, both for my columns and my Christmas letters. I think the industry is changing. I think it’s going to learn how to value its employees. A couple of reasons stand out:
1. The people who are managers now are the same poor souls who survived all of those rounds of layoffs. If they can’t learn from that lesson, nobody can.
2. These new kids cost a boatload of money! It isn’t cheap to recruit these days. If I was a manager plopping down some of the signing bonuses and other perks that today’s new recruits are demanding, I’d make darn sure those new-hires stuck around and proved their worth as human resource “investments.”

I honestly don’t think my daughter has a bit of interest in a career in oil and gas, but I won’t discourage her if she decides to go in that direction. If you end up hiring a kid with the last name of Duey, be nice to her. Her mom’s a reporter.