GeoCareer in Egypt

After a year and half of job hunting for a geologist position, I feel like I'm searching for water on Mars. It's hard to find suitable position match your qualifications. I know it has become global issues for geology career, but I don't want to lose my faith. Government oil/mining companies already have corrupted hiring system. In general, they ask you for your grade (GPA), they hire only the perfect student, but How can they judge the low grade fresh graduates? the national universities has given you this grade/score, because they are using bad/old education system not applicable in the industry. Some universities adding general subjects or Islamic subjects/syllabi that doesn't related to geoscience and that's may affect on your (GPA). I hope one day we end any corrupted system to provide fair jobs for everyone or change the minds of who in charge. On the other hand foreign companies and investors always want experienced geologist, but most of Egyptian geologist are fresh graduate. I surprised! when I realized the employment gap between foreign companies and the government, there's no connection.

Cross-posted on GeoSelim here

Raffle for AGI's Most Popular Publications!

Come share your thoughts about connecting geoscience graduate and employer needs at the YES Network-APECS town hall meeting today (7pm, Room 5), and you could win one of AGI's most popular publications: the Glossary of Geology or the Geoscience Handbook. To enter the drawing for the raffle, sign up on the YES Network sheet at the town hall meeting. The lucky winners will be drawn tonight and will be notified by email tomorrow. Prizes can be picked up at the AGI exhibit booth (59) at 3pm on Thursday. Thank you to the American Geological Institute for providing these prizes!

And the winners are...
... Todd Albert - Glossary of Geology
... Matheswaran Karthikeyan - Geoscience Handbook

Congratulations to both!

April 5th is YES Network day at EGU 2011!

What a whirlwind of a day at EGU! No kidding about the whirlwind either. There were high winds and rain showers that rolled in as I headed out to the conference center this afternoon. As soon as everyone got off the train, the winds unleashed and rain came down in horizontal sheets. Then as fast as it came, it was gone. The day seemed to whirl right by just as fast.

Prof. Aberra Mogessie, who served on the Scientific Committee for the YES Africa Symposium and presented at the Opening Ceremony stopped by to chat with AGI and YES Network members at the AGI booth (#59).

I also saw a couple of great posters about developing networks of geoscientists committed to working on natural hazard issues, and to providing the data sets as open access. That reminded me of the virtual roundtable discussions at the YES Africa Symposium this January. Here are some links to the abstracts, so those of you who are already collaborating on these type of projects can expand your network with some more people who are interested in the same topic. Here's the link to the abstracts at the poster session this afternoon entitled: Global capacity building efforts in Seismology.

That leads us into tomorrow which is the main YES Network day at EGU 2011. We kick off the day with lunch at noon. We're all going to meet at the booth #59 and go out to eat lunch. If the weather is nice, we'll head over to the park right behind the conference center. Then there is the poster session at 5:30-7pm in Hall XL followed by the YES Network-APECS town hall session "Career development: How do we integrate geoscience graduate and employer needs?" at 7pm in Room 5.

I just checked the stats, and we have over 60 web-based participants registered for the YES Network-APECS townhall tomorrow, and a large majority are YES Network members! We're really looking forward to having you all join us for the discussion. Please keep spreading the word about the town hall. We are very much looking forward to making this a super-interactive session by bringing together our web-participants and in-person audience. So the more people we have online and in the room, the better!

After the town hall is over, we'll be headed out to Cafe Einstein for the YES Network-APECS networking social. Thank you again to AGU and SCAR for sponsoring this event. We'll see you all tomorrow either in the virtual world at the townhall, or in person here at EGU.