From Petroleum Engineer to Entrepreneur: Career Growth in the Oil & Gas Industry with Yogashri Pradhan

Welcome And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Automation Ladies, the only podcast we know of where girls talk about industrial automation. Welcome to another episode of Automation Ladies. This one has been in the queue for at least over a year. I was just talking offstage with my guest. I don't remember when I first invited her onto the show, but she caught my attention on LinkedIn at least a year or two ago as a fellow podcaster, but in the oil and gas industry. And she is also a woman of many talents, uh, and possibly somebody like me that likes to engage in multiple different things that have to do with the industry and the things she's interested in. So I finally got a chance to get her scheduled. Uh, and it's just me today. Um, Ali and Courtney are respectively doing their own thing. Uh, and we are trying to, as you know, just kind of host the conversations with the people that we want to talk to. And I'm the person that got incredibly intrigued to talk to our guest today. So welcome, Yoga Shri Pradhan. How are you? I am great.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Thank you so much for the invitation. How about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Absolutely, I'm doing pretty good. It is thunderstorming today in Houston. Uh, we are on a flood watch, which is, of course, very common, so it's not a huge deal. But it means that my dog gets really scared and peas in the house. Uh, so it's one of those days, but gray outside. Um, but otherwise a pretty wonderful Friday, I'd have to say. And especially because we were able to slot this in, and uh, this is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

Yeah, usually I take a nap in the afternoon. So this is one of those things where I'm awake now and I'm really interested in having this conversation. It's actually raining in Midland as well. And even though it's not raining to where it's a flood watch, the roads get flooded anyway.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

So it's still dry there most of the time, right? It's really dry. Yeah. Yeah. I've actually never been out there. Um I know a bit about it, and I know you know a lot of people that do go out there for work or have been out there in the Permian Basin. Um, and then I saw that you were on a collide podcast uh recently, right? And so uh those guys, I met Colin last year. Yeah, it was probably last year around OTC, which OTC is coming up next week. Are you coming to town for that?

SPEAKER_02 2:13

I'm not coming to town for that, but I am coming to town for a quantum computing symposium, which is on May 14th through 15th of the week after that. Oh and I'm running that quantum computing symposium along with 40 other committee members. So that it's gonna be held at Rice University, and it's gonna be a really great opportunity for people to learn about oil and gas applications in quantum computing.

Career Path Through The Permian

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Wow, that's exciting. Um, quantum computing is one of those things that I've kind of been loosely following over the years. I used to work in AI uh in the Bay Area before the LLMs. So I also saw a recent video of yours on LinkedIn about AI and how the current AI technologies really haven't been around that long, since about 2017, uh, which is funny because that's when I was uh actually speaking on stages about how chat would become kind of the future interface to a lot of business applications uh as powered by AI. And at the time I was in Berkeley, California. And so there were uh a number of obviously startups in the quantum computing space coming out in Berkeley at that time. Um, but not something that I've paid a lot of attention to lately. So I uh would be very interested to hopefully catch some of your bite-sized content uh if I'm not gonna be able to make it to that symposium. That's pretty cool. So are you uh oh man, I've got so many questions foirling around. Um, but I should just start with kind of our basic, try to keep a little bit of an episode format here before I go nuts in a thousand different directions. Ah, can you tell me? Just tell us, tell us, tell our audience who you are, a little bit about yourself and where you came from and how you got to be doing what you're doing today. And you can take that as an invitation to be as brief or as long-winded as you like.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

I'll take it as the resume version of the I'll take a resume version of that answer because I was also asked, um I get asked a lot about tell me about yourself, or that's the most common question.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah, and you kind of gotta start with that if people have no idea who you are, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Yeah, if you have no idea who I am, I guess you start with the most common question about tell me about yourself. Well, what's on paper, I worked for a number of companies out in the Permian, all unconventional, all reservoir production engineering. So worked as a petroleum engineer for a number of companies, number of big name companies. You can call like there's a Chevron, Kotera, Kotera's out merged with Devon. I also used to work for Devon. I worked for Endeavor before they were acquired by Diamondback. So I've worked for a number of companies. I've also worked for University Lands, which is the entity that leases out 2.1 million acres to over 280 operators out in the Permian. So my career through and through has been Permian-based, and I've lived in Midland for about nine years, grew up in Houston, got my bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Texas, got my master's degree in petroleum engineering from Texas AM University, got my math. Yeah, so I represent both schools in some capacity. To some capacity. And then I got my MBA at Chicago Booth School Business, so you Chicago, uh, that was back in 2024. But that's like what you see me on paper. Now I went off to do my own thing after when I got laid off in June. And I decided, well, everyone tells me I ought to be an entrepreneur, so why don't I just do that? And look answering the what if question rather than spending my entire life working for corporate, never knowing what that what if was, never taking that step. So after taking that step, I started Iron Lady Energy Advisors. I became and did a doing a bunch of fractional work where I'm the chief growth officer of OPXAI, which is focused on being a strike team and creating a repository of field information that way, whenever there are field personnel that are having handover issues from the night shift to the day shift, or if you have some people on staff that has 30 years of knowledge, I mean, where are you going to store all that knowledge? Well, we have a tool for that. So um we have a buddy app which I'm more than happy to share with you. You can ask questions to it and you'll get the answers of how it can help you solve your well problems. And then I you mentioned this before offline before we started recording, where I work as a fractional VP for a moving company that is local to the Permian area. So I do that. And there's among other things that I do, I do a lot of nonprofit work, I do adjunct professorships, I I teach at UTPB for a couple business school classes. And yeah, that's that's a that's a little bit about me.

Layoffs And Choosing Entrepreneurship

SPEAKER_00 7:05

A lady of many, many talents. I love that, and many interests, right? As they all kind of tie into some central theme, right? But yeah, that that is a a a breed of people, I think. It's not for everyone uh to do this kind of thing. But then entrepreneurship, definitely I I can imagine as somebody like you, it's essential. Are you finding that it is something that you enjoy now that you've tried it?

SPEAKER_02 7:29

It is something that I enjoy. It's not easy. No, but it's it's choose your own hard. I tell this to people, I give this a I give an analogy. Do you want to be fat and depressed, or do you want to work out and keep your figure and choose your hard?

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah. No, I've I've wholesale subscribed to that idea as well at this point that you are gonna have to struggle with something. Yeah, and if your life is super cushy, you're gonna find all kinds of immaterial things to worry about, just because it's a human condition, I think, that we are going to we are conditioned to always be afraid of being eaten at some point. We can't be comfortable for too long. So are you gonna struggle with something that is of your choice and hopefully has a reward that is of your choice because of that struggle? Or are you gonna let life then choose other things you're gonna struggle with? Right. Correct. Um, I actually most recently just uh, and I I shared this with you offline, but I unfortunately went through just, you know, in the last few months and last year uh a really big personal hardship losing my husband. And so part of me was, you know, pretty down for a while. It's a lot of grief, a lot of different feelings and struggle and trying to figure out my life. And I let my like not that I ever had a really good like exercise routine before that, but I was pretty good about being physically active before that happened, before I got pneumonia, also shortly before that happened. So then I kind of let that go. And I didn't pick it back up at all up until about two weeks ago. And I finally realized I was like, you know what? I shouldn't, why am I giving myself an excuse to make myself worse rather than just choosing to like go forward and do the hard thing and start working out again? Um because for me, I've always focused more on like the intellectual challenges um and work challenges and solving complex like problems and my own health has been less of an interest to me. But now that I'm like pushing 40, it's like actually this stuff really matters. Uh so anyway, I digress, but I I totally connect with that. And then the moving company thing, maybe you have some tips for me offline. Although I've already gotten some good tips from my coworker at Wintech, uh, my VPS sales, Keith Moyer. He used to own a moving company, but I am now in the process of having to move. Uh, I have to be out of my house in two weeks. And I was just telling my brother-in-law I need to get some quotes for moving because I'm not doing it myself.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

I'm more than happy to help you on that front. We can talk offline on that. Um, I'm sorry to hear about your loss. And you're right about choosing your heart. And that's a great way that you put um why make an excuse to do to be something worse than than you know choosing choosing something where you're gonna get a lot of good compliments, or you're gonna you're a lot of people are going to admire your discipline, but it takes work to achieve that.

Choosing Your Hard Through Grief

SPEAKER_00 10:19

It does, it does. And running your own business, um going out on your own. I mean, first of all, I'm sorry that you go through a layoff, you would think that somebody with your experience and multiple degrees and things like that wouldn't be susceptible to that, but I think honestly anybody is at this point, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Anybody is susceptible to a layoff. In fact, I went through three of them in my 10-year career. Wow.

Energy Industry Reality Check

SPEAKER_00 10:41

So yeah, I've been laid off three times in my oil and gas industry is very uh like cyclical, right? And it has a lot to do with outside factors. Uh correct. And and so I I do hear that quite a bit. I've never worked in it directly. I was actually uh when I was in high school, I I had the option to get an internship at one of the big oil companies because one of my best friends in college is a petroleum engineer and his parents work in the industry. But I was, I don't know, I came from Scandinavia and I was really kind of idealistic about certain things, and I didn't feel like I had a fit in the oil industry here in Texas, and I wanted to leave and do other things. Um and now I realize I don't know, it's it's more complex than that. And it is really the energy industry. It's not necessarily just oil and gas, right? A lot of these companies are investing in and exploring and doing lots of other things relating to energy. So now I find it a lot more interesting than I used to, especially now that I'm back here in Houston and it's just a big part of what goes on here. Uh a lot of automation, obviously, involved, um, although it's not automation specific. So, yeah, what caught my attention initially when I saw your LinkedIn profile was your uh podcast, The Petro Papers. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what made you start that?

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Sure. I like to nerd out on a lot of things oil and gas related. I was thinking to myself, similar to a book club, why don't we debunk or demystify, not debunk, but demystify technical papers by interviewing the author of those papers, by learning about the gist of what the paper is about, increasing the excitement and engagement for people to read the paper and then learn how we can take some of these ideas and innovation forward. I've also transformed the podcast by interviewing technical leaders. A lot of people like to interview like general leadership and talk about leadership skills, which there's nothing wrong with that. But I uh I don't hear many technical voices being heard. So I thought, why don't I create a platform to have those technical voices being heard? So similar to yourself, as far as like juggling lots of things, I also decided to do a thing called Mensa's musings because I am a part of Mensa. And I was thinking if I did a monologue for about 10 minutes and inspire people to do a deep dive on topics, which is still petrol papers related, why don't we just do something on that? So there are several directions that can go with the with the podcast, but that became the genesis of the podcast where there's just a lot of technical papers out there and and uh I think people need to be excited about certain ideas.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah. I used to I used to read a lot of papers on AI back in 2017, 18. Um, because the company I worked for was actively looking for new models to try to operationalize and actually put into practice. Uh, we were doing applied AI, uh, but it was kind of early days, and a lot of them you you do did a lot of POCs, and some of them worked and some of them didn't, right? And there's when you read a paper, there's a lot of promise, but it doesn't mean that it's been commercialized, right? So there's a whole process there. Um, the other thing is actually, I think let's say before that, 2015, 2016, I was reading a lot of papers on metamaterials, which are really interesting. Um materials that are have multiple different types of properties, electrical, thermal, um, different ways that they can be stimulated and changed. So for instance, like if you think of like an invisibility cloak technology, like that exists. And it's using like electromagnetics to change the pro the visual properties of materials and things like that. And I am like literally the only person in my circle that I know that has any interest in reading papers like that, and I would never have anybody to talk to about them, other than a few of my like PhD customers. The reason I got interested in those papers in the first place is because I was selling electromagnetic simulation software and I found some people that were working on these types of problems and writing these papers and then simulating this behavior. And I remember that's when I first got Twitter and I started tweeting about these metamaterial papers, and like I got like five followers. I don't know. Um, my friends uh, or my husband's friends used to call me Nicopedia back in the day because I just get like interested in some of these off-the-wall ideas or technologies, and then I know way more about them than I should for any good reason. So I totally connect to that. Um and I love that you just went ahead and did it and put it into practice. Uh was there anybody like that encouraged you to do that? Did you feel like you just have kind of the intrinsic motivation to do these things for yourself? Or do you think it takes mentorship or I don't know, the right conditions to be a person that can like start these things? Because I feel like a lot of people are interested in, but they never act on these sorts of urges or ideas.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

It was all intrinsic motivation. Like no one told me you should do a podcast on technical papers. I just thought I love reading technical papers. I want to spread the wealth, I want to spread the love. I want to know if anyone else out there would like to listen to technical papers too, which honestly you can take the technical paper into so many directions. But think about crime junkie where the hosts, like the hosts, like would do their research on a certain event.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

Uh I like to think of me as a as a well doctor or a crime junkie, but when it comes to technical papers, so you have to share with me some of the technical papers that you were reading back in 2015, 2016, and 2017, because I would love to take a read on those and I would love to interview people.

Curiosity Culture And Learning In Public

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Oh, yeah, it's been a while. I'll have to figure out where the heck they are or that I wrote them down or anything. Um, that is one of my challenges with my ADHD, is like I I have a lot of things that come up, and then I some usually forget where where in my brain and or where in my digital universe I put that thing. Um and then, you know, my interest kind of wax and wane with different things that are going on. Right now I'm really interested in power generation because of the whole data center thing and yeah, uh the AI. Obviously, if I'm a user of AI, I try to I think about okay, the AI that we use now, right? Like I used to work with designing chips. Uh, and so just like that whole ecosystem is really interesting to me. And then the resources that it takes, and then the challenges that we're having in building these. Um and so I have a person I bet you would love to interview uh that has developed uh pretty interesting behind-the-meter power generation technology that is also applicable to oil and gas wells. But anyway, yeah, well, more about that later. So part of my initial question, I asked a pretty generic tell me about yourself question. But we usually actually kind of try to take it in the direction of what inspired you to get into engineering in for in the first place? Because this is a show called Automation Ladies, not because it's about women, but what inspired us to do this show is that me and Allie and Courtney, my co-host, kind of found each other on LinkedIn. And we hadn't worked with a lot of women in our field before. There's typically not a lot of us in the same facility, maybe, um, at least in the kind of areas that we were in. And I didn't ever really seek it out. I didn't feel like, oh my gosh, I I feel so bad for myself because I'm around men all day. But when I found these girls that I really connected with and we were kind of like friends and we were into the same stuff, I realized that is actually really cool. And I would like to have more women maybe find us or find each other through now that we have the internet, right? We have LinkedIn. Um, and we wanted to bring, similar to what you said, a lot of the industry podcasts are leadership based. They interview leaders and accomplished people, and they often focus on the business aspect or you know, something like that. And I was just like, I want to talk to A, more women in the industry and B more people in jobs that I don't know of or in jobs that could be interesting for people to know that they can move into. Um so we started this show to kind of have those conversations and we wanted to hear, because not a lot of women coming into this industry. Um, how do the ones that are here, how do they come into it? Because it's typically not marketed to us, like at the high school level, that we should become engineers. But I'm curious to hear how did you decide to become a petroleum engineer?

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Well, I was always a fan of math and science. I grew up loving it. My parents figured that out at a very like when I was very young, and they encouraged that. My mother encouraged that in me, like doing math competition, science fairs, and I was always into it. I was always into that.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

And I was I always like to tell people that I'm a product of women in STEM initiatives. I went to an all-girls engineering camp that U of H had. It's called grade camp. So that was right before I went to high school. And that was we learned all sorts of engineering. We did robotics, we did we learned about oil and gas, we learned about aerospace, we learned about biomedical, we learned about all sorts of engineering for the girls. And it was a week-long camp. And they really just drilled it down to us about how awesome it is to be an engineer, and I was interested. So that planted the seed in me where you know, I thought to myself, well, maybe I I can be an engineer, maybe I can I can do that. I mean, not that I never knew that, and but it was just more interesting to me. So I chose petroleum engineering my junior year of uh not college, my junior year of high school. And I started applying to different universities, and I learned that some of the best universities are in my backyard. Well, yeah, growing up in Houston, some of the best universities are in Texas. So I chose to go to UT to get my petroleum engineering degree.

Women In STEM And Early Influence

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, that is a great program there. I chose to go there um also for the business school. Um, I was pretty decent at math and science, but it wasn't my favorite. Um, but I realized I really like problem solving. So I ended up kind of in this other other middle ground where I got a business degree, but I couldn't stay away from doing something a bit technical. Uh so I ended up doing sales engineering in a you know first few years of my career, which is really cool because I got to learn so much technical stuff from the people doing the hardcore engineering and then helping them like solve problems around it, uh, which to me is super interesting. And I got to go into factories of like all different kinds and find out how things are made. But yeah, I I didn't learn too much about the oil and gas uh industry. And now I'm in this place where I'm like, yes, I I I have this uh really great opportunity to to learn a lot. Um I went to OTC last year. I may stop by next week uh if I can, if I can make some time. But then I am actually also I'm I'm participating in uh energy projects conference, EPC conference in June as the chair of the power generation track, because now that I was interested in power generation, um got this really great opportunity to to help with that. Um and I think there's this yeah, this kind of openness about our curiosities, right? Like I'm not an expert in it, but I will tell everyone that I know. That I'm really interested in it right now. And so lo and behold, like somebody that's interested and passionate and can learn, there's all kinds of opportunities. Uh and I try to tell my audience that like you don't have to know the thing to be known for the thing, even like if it's something that you're interested in, you want to learn, like tell everybody that you're learning it. I mean, don't just say it and not do anything, like make an effort for yourself to learn on your own. But all kinds of people that will teach you will find you if you're open about what you're doing and what you're learning. Absolutely. How have you been able to find? Um, I know that you mentioned something on your profile or uh somewhere about mentorship. Is that has that played a big part in your career? And how did you find your mentors or how did you go about that?

SPEAKER_02 22:46

Mentorship was a huge part of petroleum engineering for me. I was in a program when I was in high school called the GT Mentorship Program. It's not like the GT program where you take a bunch of classes, but there was a mentorship program where selected students through an interview process based on their interests, based on their aptitude, they were selected to do a research paper on a topic that they wanted to pursue in a career that they wanted to pursue at the time.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

So I chose patroleum engineering and I chose to write a paper on CO2 sequestration and CO2 flooding. I don't know why I conflated both those topics, but I did. And I decided to talk about both of those. It was something to do with CO2.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

I wrote the paper, and then we were asked to send this paper through cold calling, cold messaging, potential mentors in the Houston area for our mentorship.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Oh, that is such good practice for real life.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

It is great practice for real life. I wasn't afraid to cold email, I just did it because I was like, well, the worst they can say is no or no response. And out of all of those cold emails, I got one response. And that one response ended up being the mentor that I still keep in touch with today. Um, he works for a company, the company at the time was called Sierra Hamilton or Hamilton Group Engineering, and now it's called or NGS or something like that. Um, so yeah, Claude Thorpe is the guy that was my first mentor in in the oil and gas industry. So shout out to Claude for answering my cold email. Turns out he is a longhorn as well, went to UT for business. Okay. And yeah, so he he saw that I wanted to go to UT and was really excited that I wanted to go to UT.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah, I I almost got the opportunity to write a recommendation letter for um my friend Alma's son to go to UT. Alma Fernandez was our very first guest on Automation Ladies. Nice was uh an inside sales representative at the time, and now she's oh, such a badass. She's been promoted so many times since then. I think she's in manufacturing leadership now, but she became like a branch manager for two of the branches of her distributor company that she works for. And her son is now going to UT and she asked me if I could write something for him. And then he just, I guess, submitted his application without it and completely forgot. So I didn't get a chance to write a letter. But I'm hoping one day somebody reaches out to me. I'm I'm open to that. Um I also feel like I've kind of am still in the stage where I need mentors rather than mentoring anyone. But I also realize that that's kind of a BS way of thinking because I can learn from anyone, but also like I can definitely teach people things, whether or not I'm some sort of master at anything. Um, I've probably experienced more things in some areas than everyone, right? Like nobody really takes the same path. Um, do you feel like there is a like a formal idea for who should mentor and who should be a mentee?

SPEAKER_02 25:48

I never really did formal mentoring or mentee or anything like that. I mean, I've I mentor a lot of people, but I usually perceive it as people asking me questions and I just answer them.

unknown 26:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

Or I answer them through a video. So I mentor a lot of people. I do have a mentee that is in Germany right now, and he was in Ghana, but he has this, he is aspiring to be a reservoir engineer, wants to be the best reservoir engineer possible. And apparently, uh like me mentoring him has gotten him to a master's degree program, has helped him do really well in the petrol competitions, and he's usually crediting me with it, but it's the truth is it's it's all his efforts. And sometimes people just want to know that somebody is there to root for them or somebody's there to support them in whatever capacity. Yeah. So I I I I also don't think that I mean, I also think that mentoring and being mentored are not mutually exclusive. Like you can be mentored and you can mentor other people at the same time. It's not like you reach a level of completion in your mentorship in order for you to mentor other people. So there is no certification in that. There, I think I I see it as a I see it as an informal deal, but I get asked all the time, like, can I mentor you? And I usually take that as something that's a little bit formal, where and that takes a lot of time, but if you ask me a question, you can trick me into it.

Internships And Staying Marketable

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah, I think Ali has informally mentored a lot of people like that. Um, or both of us, probably. Like I give people advice a lot or I answer their questions. Um, I just don't see it, it's it's not necessarily a kind of formal ongoing relationship. We will have an episode coming soon uh with a couple of ladies that have done very formal mentorship relationships, and many of them because I was very interested to hear when I spoke with um Heidi for the first time that she's had like 14 mentors and she takes a much more like systematic approach about it. And so we're gonna have one of her mentors and her on the show soon, uh, which is really exciting. Because I just I've never had a mentor officially, and I think it has kind of scared me a little. But then I realized I've probably had a lot of unofficial mentors and help, right? And it takes people noticing you, giving you a push, whether that's just telling you, hey, I think you can do this or giving you some advice or whatever. Um, my dad, I guess, is probably kind of my original mentor, um, was also my boss. I started working for him when I was like 14. But you can learn from anywhere. And and yeah, I don't want people to get it discouraged that if they don't do it a certain way, like that there's no value in that. I want to give a shout out to Miriam. Um, Miriam Soleiman, she's in she's at uh UT Austin right now in a master's program. She's from uh Nigeria and she reached out to Ali, probably on LinkedIn many years ago, and since then has gone to a uh she went to Carnegie Mellon University Africa and she came to Pittsburgh and she completed her master's there, and now she's getting her PhD at UT Austin. Yeah. Yeah. And so we actually started OT SkateCon partially to be able to afford to pay for Miriam's visa to come here for an interview. And she's such a rock star, and it's been such a joy to like see how far she's gotten, and at this point, like even way further in her education than either me or Allie ever got, because we both just got bachelor's degrees and then you know, got to work. And I've always wanted to get more education, but I also have found I haven't found the right opportunity to go pay for a full-time like education. I feel like I learned so much on the job all the time. Um, and I try to find myself more work, obviously, on the side, like I can't like doing the conference or the podcast or or different things like that. So um lifelong learning, I think, is one of those things that I've ingrained very much. Uh I graduated in 2008 from college, which is big recession time. Everybody stopped hiring, everybody was getting laid off all over the place. And so I kind of immediately realized that like I may not stick around somewhere for a long time. My initial like thought about my career was kind of like, I don't know, my grandparents. They worked in one place like almost their entire careers and then retired with nice benefits. And then I realized I was like, crap, that's not probably not gonna happen. Uh, did you feel like there was some sort of external like how how much did you feel like you knew when you went into the oil and gas industry about the kind of impermanence of jobs and the fact that you have to probably build your own skills to be marketable constantly? Is that something that you realized early on, or did it take the first layoff to kind of tell you that?

SPEAKER_02 30:51

I learned that early on. Yeah. I learned that you always have to, you always have to put yourself out there. Cause I was all because, you know, even after the first, it's even after the first internship, you want to try out for another internship, you still have to put yourself out there. You still have to go through the interview process. So it didn't take a layoff for me to do that. I think by the time my first layoff happened, uh, I had the skill set, I had the context, I had the I had whatever it took to land.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yeah. So I went to business school, and but most of my friends were in engineering, chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and they had co-ops and internships. And I realized that hardly anybody in the business school, like none of my business school friends were doing co-ops weren't a thing. Like, and not a lot of people, not everybody was doing internships either. And so also when I applied for my first job, uh, it was like kind of like a group interview situation. So we did a pre-interview, like multiple kind of you know, online assessments, Zoom, like a video interview and things like that. And then they flew us, flew a group of people out to Chicago and did like these group roundtable interviews and different things like that. So I got to know some of the other candidates. And a lot of them had like never had a job before, um, or had not had an internship either. So when they were asking a lot of the interview questions, they were like, Yeah, you can talk, I talk about a time that you worked on, like a group project, and they were expecting the answers to kind of be like college, you know, like, oh, I'm gonna talk about a college project that I did. But I had been working since middle school, so all my answers were like actually work related from work. But I was really surprised, I guess, at like what how a lot of people come out of college with like no actual work experience. I wonder why, and this is not necessarily a question for you specifically, but like I'm just thinking, I wonder why engineering does have that, like it's very common. Almost all my engineering friends had co-ops and internships, but my business school friends didn't. Maybe it's because like the work you do is so critical that you just can't have like random people with no real skills going into the workforce. Any thoughts or ideas on that?

SPEAKER_02 33:04

I don't have experience on people not having internship or work experience being majority. I can't speak for the business school, but I've just been surrounded by people obsessing over getting internships when I was in school.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Like that, that and UT did such a good job, like the patrol engineering program, such a good job in just instilling the importance of getting work experience and interview prep and just real skills that you're gonna have in the workplace. And it's not it's balancing the technical skills with the with the essential skills. I'm not gonna call them soft skills, but I I felt like I was I had in fact I put a lot of pressure on myself getting out of uh like getting into getting into university, and I cared more about landing an internship than I mean, I hate to say it than my grades, because I was just so obsessed with getting work experience because I well at the time I was just so I was in a validation trap. Like the only way I was gonna get validation from uh from the industry is if I have some big names on my resume, which I worked really hard to get those big names on my resume. So I I worked really hard for internships. Um, I will say that fewer and fewer people have fallen through the cracks over the years because yes, I did have some friends that didn't have any work experience upon graduation from college. So I think schools are doing a really good job in helping you balance what's expected in the real world versus balancing your courses and developing that ticket to get that interview, which is your grades and your classes.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Yeah. The big name thing is kind of interesting because it doesn't necessarily say anything about your skills, but it does, it's like a it's like a virtual, it's a signal of value, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Like it's it's the virtual social proof, it's like an industry social proof. Like, oh, you know, this company went through your background check.

SPEAKER_00 35:04

Yay!

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

How much of uh your college education really translated to what you ended up doing in real life? Is that was that pretty close? Did you use those skills?

SPEAKER_02 35:15

It really depends on what job I had. So, for example, I did on conventionals in the Permian Basin, and I think there's like a couple classes in my university as far as technical skills go that were applicable to that. There's conventional reservoir engineering, which I d I didn't have much of an opportunity to apply, which is what was taught in school.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Okay.

Side Gigs Creative Work And The Book

SPEAKER_02 35:39

So I had to learn a lot of things from scratch. But I also teach the petroleum engineering professional engineers exam. So that's all conventional petroleum engineering. So I did have to dig into my books and I did have to find that. So for some of my side gigs, I did. What got you into doing that? What got me into doing that is I think I was just always into that. I I just what I never felt a nine to five was enough for me, for my energy level. Yeah. Where I would work for a certain number of hours, but then I like to do other things. I like to do podcasting, I like to do YouTube, I like to express myself creatively, I like to write, I like to, I like to do a bunch of projects, I like to do nonprofit work, I like to like to network, I like to hold happy hours. I held a happy hour event yesterday. I'm holding one next week. So I I there were just so much, so many things I like to do. And I can't stuff it in one day.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

I know it's really, I often say this, but like I wish I could clone myself or like make more hours in the day or something, because there's just so there's a multitude of things that I would love to do or learn. Like the the idea of being alive today with the opportunities we have is it's kind of insane. Like I feel like if I had been born, I don't know, 50 or 100 years ago, like I would I don't know, I would be the weirdo of the village doing some weird thing.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Yeah, I would be the weird one just being very vocal and speaking up, and everyone would look at me weird. But the truth is, like, there were a lot of women before me that spoke up and they were vocal and you know, did a lot of and moved a lot of things along that made it easy for me.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Yeah, for sure. But there's just like there are so many opportunities to learn and apply yourself now. Um, I get asked this. I was just talking to Allie earlier today, and I I was I'm reading a book right now um by this woman who is a very successful entrepreneur. Uh her book is called Start with Yourself. And she's a mother of four and like a really successful entrepreneur. And I it's one of the few books I can relate to in the sense of like she's as obsessed with what she does and her work as I am, but also cares a lot about her family and she's a mom. And she's like, it's not realistic to be able to do all of this and do it all 100%. Like there's only so many days, hours in the day, and so on. But you know, with help and with prioritizing and with the trade-offs, you just have to decide what are the trade-offs. What do you want to, if you're not gonna decide them, then something else will decide them. Decide for you. Yeah. Right. So don't be apologetic about being the kind of person that does a lot. Just be intentional about how you divide your time, where you make sure that you don't slip up, right? In the case of like, I choose when and where I need quality time with my kids, but I'm not gonna be there, you know, every hour of the day, every day, because I really do love what I do. And I was telling Ali, and I was like, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna stop. Like, people always ask, like, oh, if I have any hobbies. I'm like, no, you know what? It's okay. I am a workaholic and I'm really into what I do, and not all of it is my day job, but it's this is what I'm interested in. And so these are my hobbies. I don't have another, like, I mean, I like to, I don't know, make star crowd and kombucha sometimes and stuff, but like it's it's not enough for me to call it a hobby. My professional andor academic and learning and networking interests are kind of what take over my extra time. Do you have any hobbies totally unrelated? You said you like to be creative and write and express yourself. Is it like within the realm of all the other stuff you do, or do you have something completely different that you have as a hobby?

SPEAKER_02 39:19

It's within the realm. Okay. And the writing part, yeah. I have a book coming out in July of this year. It's called Fueling Impact. So it's about how I built my brand in oil and gas and spent 15 years and everything that I've done to balance, you know, developing that credibility, but also putting myself out there, like how why networking works.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

So that's uh that's what the book is about. And it'll be out July, end of July of 2026. So that's pretty exciting. Let us know when that drops.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

We will uh I would love to you know promote that to our audience, put it in our newsletter or something. Uh, that's really exciting. Did somebody tell you you should write a book, or was that another intrinsic motivation thing?

SPEAKER_02 40:04

That was another intrinsic motivation thing. I'm really impressed by that.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

I was told for years I should do a podcast before I did, and I always was like, no, why would I do that?

SPEAKER_02 40:14

The only intrinsic thing that wasn't in the only thing that wasn't intrinsic motivation was you should be an entrepreneur. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

That one I knew from an early age that I wanted to do, actually.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

Yeah, I I didn't know how to define it. I how it was never defined to me. And then someone was like, Have you reconsidered entrepreneurship? And I'm like, no.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

And I think the reason was for me is because my dad became an entrepreneur and I kind of saw him as one of my role models. And so I thought I would like to start my own business one day. And I took a couple, like, I, you know, I got an international business degree, and I found whenever there was an entrepreneurship-related class, I would take it. And I came up with one of them we had to come up with a company idea and pitch it and like pitch it in front of real investors too, because the professor was also a professional. Um, and he had exited a company before that he got funded. And so he was like, I'm gonna, you know, kind of walk people through this. And partially we were told like we should go for this. Like the investors were like, we would actually invest in this. You should try to. There was like an on-campus investment club, and they were like, you should come pitch us and like make this thing a company. And I at the time was like, oh heck no, I need some work experience. It's a good idea. I didn't think it was a bad idea, but I don't know how on earth I would run this thing. Um, and I'm really glad I didn't because this was before the iPhone got apps, and so it was a hardware device that like it was a hardware device with software. And then like a year later, it would have just been an app on the app store, and I would have wasted all this money putting up a supply chain for hardware devices that I never would have needed to manufacture. Um, so I'm really glad I didn't. And I was like, I need to go to work. Same thing, I wanted to get an MBA, but then I did a couple of interviews with people uh about and most people recommended to not get an MBA until you kind of have something to apply it to.

unknown 42:08

Yeah.

Visibility For Women Without Tokenism

SPEAKER_00 42:08

Some old experience or an actual problem you want to solve. Um, and so I waited on that, and I'm still waiting on that. Uh but it's uh yeah, I that's really cool. I'm really impressed that you same thing people have told me over the last few years. We should I should write a book or we should write a book, me and Allie and Courtney. Uh and I don't know, I like writing. I don't like writing about myself. I've started to write uh industry like magazine articles this year, and I've been lucky enough to get them fairly well received. I had an article published in OEM magazine a couple weeks ago, um, and another one in packaging OEM. You can tell I work with I work with machinery OEMs. Yeah. Uh but writing is not part of my job. It's not anything that I've ever had a reason to do other than I find I like to express my ideas, I guess, and sometimes in written form, more so than video. But uh yeah, maybe I'll be inspired by you and and see about getting the book started sometime among the many, many other things. I know my friend Megan Zimba is writing a book too. Uh so hats off to you. I'm very excited, I'm really excited to read it. Thank you. Please let our audience know when when that comes out. We'll make sure to share it. Do you have any uh tips? I'll say, okay, so one of the things we get asked a lot is people want to hire more women. They feel like there's not enough women in the pipeline of talent. Um, and I think getting them in is a problem that I'm not here to solve, but you know, STEM focused camps. Uh, we had an interview one of our early seasons with a woman that runs a nonprofit here in Houston called uh Girls Do Engineer. And she puts on engineering like workshops and stuff for for younger girls. And I think that's awesome. Um, I think a lot of us just don't really know that it's an option unless somebody in our life encourages us to do so. And then I found as I was trying, and now I run a conference, OT SkateCon, and it's a technical conference. We have like 20 speakers on different topics. And it's run by women, and we want to have more representation at our conference than the typical, you know, panel of of or slate of speakers. Um, but even for us, it's a challenge, right? Because like there's just if there's not a lot of people out there, and then I find reaching out, not all women want to be public or visible or go speak. They want to kind of do their job and just keep their head down. Is there anything that you would say to encourage women that are they probably don't even know that they're badasses at their job or whatever, that they could go out there and put themselves out there and start to be more visible in the industry? Or do you think it just takes a certain personality and you know, we should just go on with it, the ones of us that want to and leave the other women alone?

SPEAKER_02 45:02

It's a combination of both. You can't make someone do something. You really can't. There has to be an inflection point in someone's life to be like, I should start sharing, I should start talking about this, or it's in your personality to start talking about it or overshare to a fault. So for me, it's a combination of both. And I would say that you need your women that are vocal, that want to talk about this, that want to move a mission forward, that want to represent, but at the same time, I mean, not it's not just the representation part, it's also showing the competency that can come in many forms. Um so I think you need those women. But you also need those women who um, you know, that work and have the work show for themselves, but and be an advocate for those same women who may not be really good at showcasing themselves or putting themselves out there, be an advocate and elevate though, elevate those women. Um let them know that they're doing a good job. Sometimes some women don't know that they're doing a good job unless they were recognized for it. So be proactive in recognizing other women too.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Yeah. So if you're out there and you have some of these badass women around you working with their head down, uh, whether or not they want to go speak, I also agree with you. You can't force them, and just because they are a woman, don't make them the token woman if they don't want to. Uh, but I think it's a good practice, I think, for everyone to try to be more vocally supportive of the women around you. Because I do think that oftentimes we do seek more external validation to feel like we're doing a good job. Yeah. Um and not all of us are as intrinsically kind of willing to recognize ourselves. So if you work with a woman, like give her a nice compliment next time you can if she does a good job or or something like that. Um, because I think it matters more than we think it does on a day-to-day basis to kind of hear that externally. Is there anything that you want to talk about that you want to tell our audience, or even as a podcaster, you are also welcome to ask me a question as I'm sitting here thinking whether we just wrap it up or move on to any other topics that we haven't covered?

SPEAKER_02 47:05

I think we covered everything that we wanted to cover, or at least I that I was I'm pretty satisfied with what we covered. Um yeah, I I think you've inspired me to be more consistent in my podcast recording and my and and just the generation of ideas. Like I use AI to generate ideas sometimes, but you know, to but to think of authentic uh to be authentic and to come up with a monologue, to come up with the prep time. Like I just need to set up that time on my calendar to be more intentional about that. So yeah, thank you for inspiring me. You're welcome.

Where To Follow And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 47:38

I will be uh listening from now on. Oh, I did okay. So what I was gonna say was actually somebody asked me uh a while back or recently, I don't remember if it was on a podcast or somewhere else. I think it was on a podcast that we were on together. Um, it's a controls problem. It's a building automation podcast, uh, which is kind of adjacent to what we do, but a bit different than the industrial automation side. And they asked me what inspired me to start kind of like sharing my story and my journey um on LinkedIn. Because I do, I I do speak, I guess, a little bit more candidly than a lot of people uh about certain things and um my work and different things like that. And I also wrote a couple of posts that were very matter-of-fact, like, hey, here's kind of my early career history. And I just went through like kind of like you, my resume is a bit, you know, winding, and I've done a lot of different things. And to the outside, it doesn't always make sense why I would have done that, why I would have gone from this to that to that. And so I just wrote this like, hey, I got this job, and this is what I liked about that, and then this is why I did that next. And it ended with a cliffhanger because I realized I got too close to and this was like two, three years ago, my current situation, which was really hard. And it's a lot easier to talk about hard things in retrospect sometimes than when you're in them. Um, but the answer to that question was it was actually Allie, my co-host, that inspired me to write something like that because she put a post on LinkedIn and it was like her pinned post for a while. But it was just like the story of Ally G and PCE, her company, and how it came to be and why she did why she went from being a chemical engineer to a controls engineer to then starting her own business. And I, yeah, I want to say like if you're listening to this and maybe you don't want to do a podcast, you don't want to go give Tomp conference talks. But if you're a woman or anybody in this industry with any kind of unconventional path or something that you feel like people could maybe learn from, even it's even as simple as writing a little LinkedIn post about what you do or why you did it. And somebody like me might read that and go, Oh, I I could tell my story too. And maybe somebody else could learn from that. Um, so I I try to encourage people in our community. We don't have any kind of formal community, but it's usually just people that like like to learn, like to share, like to be kind. Um everybody can learn from you, whether you're on a podcast or just you know, sharing with a few colleagues. I think the more you can be open about yourself and you know what you do, what interests you. Now, especially in the age of AI and there's like fake people and all kinds of things, like then the real you as a person just becomes that much more important for you to be out there and for people to learn from and and talk to. So with that, um, you kind of already answered a lot of this, but our last question is usually asking our guests to tell people where they can, if they're listening to this and they're like, Yoga Shree is somebody that I want to talk to or work with or listen to, tell us all the places where people should be following you, finding you, and your content, um, and then any of the upcoming things that they can look forward to, which I know you already covered, book coming out, um, quantum computing conference in May at Rice University. Anything else that you want to make sure that we cover? And then um, our producer Veronica can put links to those things in the show notes so that people can go find those things or find you.

SPEAKER_02 51:14

Yeah, people can find me on LinkedIn, Yogoshree Pradhan. People can email me, yogoshree1126 at gmail.com, Yoshi Pradhan is the YouTube, petrol papers is the podcast, I'm pretty accessible. And then uh there is an app called Collide, and I tend to post on there pretty aggressively. So for those of you that are an oil and gas, get a collide account and start posting on there.

Automation Ladies Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 51:36

So okay, so I have a collide account, and I am totally guilty of not having logged into Collide since like last year. Um, because I think I'm just not as busy in oil and gas, that a separate app that I have to go log into is not something that I have made the time for. Um, but it is a super cool platform, and those guys also that group they started with podcasts and events um and then now have this app and there's a whole like AI to it as well. So you can ask it all kinds of questions, right? About oil and gas, like technical stuff. Is that correct? Or is Collide just like kind of the No, you're right. Yeah, yeah, right. So they do that both like commercially for companies, help them build those AI apps with their own data. But then the Collide app itself has gathered all of this information from their podcasts, their interviews, um, papers, all kinds of industry knowledge. And so it's a very like um niche hub for networking, knowledge sharing, um, and career growth, right? And all kinds of things like that within the oil and gas industry. So, yeah, highly recommend if you're into oil and gas um automation or interested in getting into that direction, uh, that would be a great community to get involved with. So thank you so much. I have I enjoyed this a lot. I appreciate you coming on the show. And I really look forward to hopefully meeting you in person at one of these events coming up here soon. Um and I will be uh nerding out on some papers coming here soon, listening to your show. So, Yogashri, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Have a great day. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Automation Ladies. If you like our content and you want to stay in touch, please connect with us on LinkedIn, follow the show page, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and you can send us a message or a copy on our website, automationladies.io. We look forward to getting to know you. Our producer is Veronica Espinosa, and our music is composed by Daniel Dick.