How to Discover Yourself by Study Abroad – with Hitisha (Petroleum Engineer)

If you are planning to study abroad, and debating what will you actually learn. Then watch this interview!

Hitisha reached out to me with following questions and then I invited her to do an interview to share her experience.

Greetings !

I am a pre-final year undergraduate student with majors in petroleum engineering. It’s rightly said life ends up in confusions.
As you might be knowing that there is recession in oil market as displayed in current news every now and then. So as the possibility of getting a job in India is pretty less. I thought to have a plan b in order to save myself from the jobless situation and ended up preparing for gre.

I have still not given the exam but the tentative dates will be in August for me appearing for the same. Now what is the confusion in it as my subject states.

Last December seeing the market and as petroleum is not a widespread field I decided to do a research internship in universities abroad.
I applied to 300 professors across the globe who teach petroleum subjects and got 5 replies (positive replies).
After screening through them (based on my budget and the stipend they will give me) I ended up selecting 2 options. One is in university of Oklahoma (USA) and other is petroleum institute (Abu Dhabi). Last summers I went to Oklahoma for an international exposure program for 30 days on J1 visa. This time I will be going on J1 research visa. The two year gap of USA when one takes j1 is a factor that scares me of taking the internship in USA as then for masters I need to sit for one year.

And I am also confused in these two options as the current markets are low there are no scopes of jobs in USA so it’s better to go for UAE where the production will never halt for at least 20 years.

I love both the projects offered to me. So interest is not playing a dominant role. I want this research internship to be an edge on my cv so that good universities give me admit after my gre. And I can’t really rank these two selected universities like that.

I seek for your help in this decision making process.