Meet the Presidents
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September 02, 2014
The talented presidents in charge of UT PGE’s most popular student organizations, SPE and AADE, share their goals for the upcoming year and what the organizations mean to them.
Jeremy Lacamu – Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE)
What would you like your presidential legacy to be?
I would like to be known as the president who helped create lasting friendships between all of its members and also helped prepare students for their future careers in the oil and gas industry.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
I’m really looking forward to our trip to Amsterdam to support UT’s PetroBowl team at this year’s SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE). Traveling internationally will be a great chance to learn about different cultures and their connection to the oil and gas industry.
Why is SPE important to you?
SPE is important to me, because it’s what really gave me my first taste of the oil and gas industry and the type of projects I would be working on throughout my career. SPE is also what helped me get involved at UT Austin and make a bunch of really close friends.
What is the most beneficial aspect of SPE?
Networking! SPE is one of the only organizations that gives you the opportunity to listen to a technical presentation from a company one day and the next day be eating BBQ and listening to music at a tailgate together. All this exposure to companies is crucial when students begin looking for jobs.
Taylor Lopez-Huebner – American Association of Drilling Engineers (AADE)
What does it mean to you to be involved in AADE?
Being involved in AADE means having the opportunity to briefly step out of my role as a student to interact with people from industry that are working on real projects. It’s a great time to interact with my peers outside of the classroom.
What would you like your presidential legacy to be?
Students in the UT PGE department have ambitious goals; they want to get good jobs and eventually develop into leaders in the oil and gas industry. My goal as president is to ensure that AADE as an organization is helping students to achieve their goals by giving them opportunities to create relationships with their peers, interact with industry, and to get a more holistic understanding of the business. AADE has a great platform to help students; my job is to ensure that we are using this resource in a way that is benefiting the students. My officer team and I have some very ambitious goals for how we want to impact the department this year.
Why is AADE important to you?
UT PGE gives students a world-class technical education. I believe participation in AADE is an important addition to the great coursework that we receive, since we start to understand how the material we are learning out of a textbook is being used around the world to push the oil and gas industry forward. Knowledge without a practical application isn’t very useful, and AADE gives students a small dose of real industry practices. More importantly, AADE allows students to develop relationships with their peers and with professionals in industry.
What do you enjoy most about AADE?
I enjoy talking with people that are as passionate about the industry as me. I have learned so much in my time here at UT, just by talking with people that I’ve met by being involved. Among the many things I have learned about, you can’t just read from a textbook, you really have to interact with people to get the full benefit. After every AADE meeting, I am more passionate about the career that I am going into; it’s just really fun to hear about what is happening in the industry right now. It’s an awesome time to be going into oil and gas.
