Final-year high school students are faced with a difficult decision when selecting their undergraduate major of choice. Often, the decision is made even more difficult by uncertainty about what different majors entail. Petroleum engineering in particular is a discipline that is generally not explored within high school classrooms and therefore students lack understanding about the roles of engineers in the oil and gas industry. To combat this uncertainty, this paper explores the potential of running pre-college project-based learning programs to increase high school students’ interest in and familiarity with pursuing various undergraduate STEM disciplines and careers. More specifically, this paper provides an insight into two case studies of novel STEM education programs, developed to enhance a group of high school students’ understanding of petroleum engineering. The programs were designed to increase students’ interest in learning about the selected petroleum engineering concepts, namely polymer flooding to enhance oil recovery and multiphase fluid flow in porous media, while simultaneously providing an understanding of the current global challenges faced by the oil and gas industry. The program also aimed to engage students in learning and applying fundamental engineering skills to relatable real-world issues. These project goals will help facilitate the desire, commonly seen in recent years, of developing countries to increase their oil and gas production. This program was applied during the Summer Engineering Academy program offered by Texas A&M University at Qatar, which provides an innovative educational space for high school students. The program was conducted with the main objective of allowing the students to understand the basic concepts of petroleum engineering via short lectures as well as laboratory experimentation. Students in Grades 9-11 spent 10 days learning about petroleum engineering applications that integrated science, engineering, and technology where they designed, built, and tested an experimental setup for understanding various processes in petroleum engineering. Students were expected to solve a common problem faced in the petroleum industry. At the end of the program, the students gained an understanding of the issues and recommended unique solutions to these problems in the form of oil-recovery based projects presented to a panel of experts. This program attempted to build bridges between the STEM education pipeline of rapidly developing countries, such as Qatar, and the new demand for talent in the oil and gas sector. The details of this novel program are presented, including the content, preparation, materials used, case studies, and the resulting learning outcomes.

The oil and gas industry in the Gulf has been vital in contributing to Qatar's economy. With the industry's rapid growth, there was a need for an exponentially larger workforce. Gender imbalance still remains one of the industry's challenges in a largely male-dominated field. However, the good news is that the female workforce has gradually increased. The rise in female engineers and scientists in the industry has resulted in, among other things, better opportunities to access higher education and training in the oil and gas field. However, there remain some obstacles that aspiring female engineers face. Based on interviews conducted with several engineers who work in multinational oil and gas companies in the Gulf states, we discuss existing challenges and issues many women engineers still encounter today. The interviewees also noted some improvements and provided helpful advice for the females aspiring to be engineers. We interviewed several female and male engineers, some of whom occupy managerial positions while others work in the fields. The interviews were conducted on Zoom over several weeks, and we then transcribed the interviews. We then analyzed the interview transcripts using a corpora analysis software, LancsBox, with each transcript separated as its own corpus. KWIC (keyword in context) tool was used to isolate a single keyword (for example, "female" or "girl") to find out how often those keywords were used and in what context in a sentence for each corpus, which helped identify the various themes that were discussed during the interview, such as gender and the workplace, challenges in the workplace, barriers to work and life balance, to list a few. The interviewees recounted their experiences, and from that data, we describe their challenges, successes, and recommendations to make the oil and gas industry in the Gulf accommodating for both genders. The challenges they describe include a lack of appropriate facilities for women on the field; sexist or difficult treatment from male counterparts, managers, and family members; a gender pay gap; and a lack of policies or incentives that support women to achieve executive positions in their companies. Some of the successes they shared include strides being made to encourage women to enter STEM programs in schools and STEM careers, a changing environment for the prevalence and inclusion of women in the oil and gas industry, and a change of culture in the world surrounding the image of women in the STEM industry. Several female interviewees mentioned familial support in their educational pursuit, suggested the creation of mentorship programs and recommended having more female role models in the industry.