INTERVIEW 02/08/09: Kyle Sterry, Geophysicist

It is quite difficult to explain, even to my geology friends – as it is seismic stuff.

Kyle, born and bred in Northumberland, northern England, and at the time of this interview, remains on the right side of 30. But only just!

He holds a BSc (Hons) Geoscience and Postgraduate Diploma in Disaster Management and Sustainable Development.

He has worked in many jobs in tourism, retail and government including a stint in France, and a Database Geoscientist at Shell, The Hague, before coming to current position as a Processing Geophysicist Quality Control for a large international onshore seismic company.

Kyle loves to travel, and has visited over 30 countries this decade. Including a two night stopover in Sydney, Australia, where Tony shouted him a Blue Tongued Lizard, and he [Kyle] promptly declared it, “Unbeer!”

Anyone want to go to Mongolia or Bhutan with him?

Tony: Tell me Kyle, what is your current job?

Kyle: I’m a Processing Geophysicist QC. Sadly the QC does not mean Queen’s Counsel, but Quality Control.

Tony: And what does that job entail?

Kyle: It is quite difficult to explain, even to my geology friends – as it is seismic stuff. So I’ll try and explain what we do and where in that my role is…

Tony: OK.

Kyle: My Company which is a major international seismic company, provides seismic survey services principally to the energy industry, and sometimes, to mining companies, academic institutions and government agencies. Occasionally we survey an area on our own initiative and then sell the data to many companies.

What we actually do is collect data of the underground, up to about 3 miles deep, depending on what our clients need to know. It works on a similar principal to sonar, used by ship to navigate around sea beds, or ultrasound on a pregnant woman.

The underground is a pretty complex thing – the Earth is a massive ball of layers upon layers, some all swished up or some are flat, and almost always with fault lines. These layers, in a certain way can harbour oil or gas.

Different clients are interested in different things. The energy industry is interested in oil and gas, while the mining industry wants to know where this or that layer will come up to the surface and move their operations there…

Tony: How did you end up in this field?

Kyle: ‘sec Tony

Tony: OK

Kyle: [continuing with his answer to the previous question]… We simply make a big bang directed into a ground using dynamite, vibrating machines or simple thumper truckers which are like a giant hammer slamming into the ground. That generates a signal which then passes through the underground and each layer bounces a little bit of that like echo back to the surface. An array of geophones – specialised microphones – picks up these tiny signals.

My role in that is to make sure all the signals are coming back in the right order, make sure no one put those microphones in the wrong place, and make sure the electronics and mechanisms are working as they should. Once I’m happy with that by checking all the data and running tests in the office, I switch from QC mode to processing mode – I process these to generate a rough image of the ground below.
I prepare those images and the raw data for shipment to clients along with a technical and non-technical report, and a whole myriad of operational reports along with that too.

As to “how did I get into the field?”

Tony: Yes.

Kyle: I graduated with a degree in Geoscience, intending to do either Geography or Computing. Anyone with an earth science, physics, mathematical or electronics degree can work in one of the roles in seismic. Myself, I took a postgraduate degree in an entirely different subject, eventually winding up at Shell in Holland as a subcontractor database geoscientist. That job was entirely office based and after consulting with a few trusted colleagues in Shell, I secured a job with a seismic company.

It’s pretty important to network with people, all the more important these days as many change jobs and careers much more than even 10 years ago, so people you work with will surprise you.

Tony: Can we hold the network question for now. What I’m interested in, is your choice of career. Most deaf people have traditionally looked to teaching, welfare, and similar sort of work, but you have chosen a career that has allowed you to work in other countries.

Kyle: Well, like you, I’m no big fan of brats, or a touchy feely person. A summer job at a park popular with such creatures ended up with them burning down a marquee and breaking into a cricket pavilion. I decided I’d best stop there before they burn a school down where I might have been a teacher at.

Tony: [laughing] Seriously?

Kyle: Yup, I was only 17. And it was a pretty rough area. But to be honest, I never really relished the idea of being a teacher anyway. I can imagine it is personally rewarding, for some people, but to progress, you become a headteacher who doesn’t teach but spend all his time catching up with red tape. Or go to a posh school and do essentially the same old thing for more money. Just does not appeal.

I like change too much.

Tony: Is that what attracted you to this job, the opportunity to travel and work in other countries?

Kyle: Spot on. For me, travel equals change. It keeps you on your toes. You learn new things; when you think you’ve seen it all, someone does something, and you fall over laughing or gobsmacked at such a cunning (or stupid) way (s) of doing something.

Tony: Hmmm…

Kyle: In my job, I work with people form up to 40 different nationalities. In my small department of four people, there’s four different nationalities – me, a Brit, an Iraqi, a Chinese and a Russian. My Company, as they go to different parts of the world, recruits some of the best local staff as long term employees. They also recruit graduates and interns from anywhere in the world.

Tony: Has your deafness been a barrier in this job?

Kyle: It present challenges, like it can in any job. As I work with people from all over the world, it can be difficult to hear what they are trying to say in mangled English. In a job like this, it’s not unusual to be rotated to different crews all the time, so every few months, just when you have gotten used to a person, you’re moved again.

I’m lucky in that I’m in a stable crew. The advantage is that you’re stuck with them during work, mealtimes and after work – so you tend to pick up their speech quicker than might otherwise be at a normal office job where you’re lucky to talk to people outside work.
Things like radio communications, I get someone else to handle that stuff for me – often other people with poor English do the same, so it’s not an unusual thing to do.

Tony: What about promotional prospects?

Kyle: One can become head of department, taking overall responsibility for the specialist staff members in it, liaison with the client company to get the best parameters for everyone, survey design and planning, and to lead technical problem solving. Occasionally that may mean working in the head offices in London or Houston preparing for the next project.

Beyond that, if one wishes to stay on crew, to become in charge of the whole crew and get things done, all the way to becoming an area manager responsible for crews across a continent and secure new jobs for them. Or one can go to the head office and hone in specialist skills, but that is at the risk of less travel.

Tony: Do you see yourself advancing in that direction?

Kyle: Ten years of experience in seismic quality control can lead to very lucrative salaries in other parts of the oil/gas industry.
I would like to, […become in charge of the whole crew and get things done, become an area manager responsible for crews across a continent and secure new jobs for them...or even move to the head office and hone in my specialist skills…] but I am an impatient man, and I like change; and I think the grass is greener on the other side.

I’m mindful that being away for so long from home can affect my social life and even health – so I don’t see myself doing this for many many years to come. That said, I like it enough at the moment and that may not change in 15 years’ time! I always keep one eye open for something else – as anyone should.

Tony: So you don’t see your current role as long term career prospect.

Kyle: I see it as a work in progress. Any job you do can lead to something else. I don’t believe we can be in a long term career in this day and age unless you’re very lucky or on an industry where it is always the same demand, such as teaching and welfare.

Tony: As you’ve related to me elsewhere, your job also provides you with interesting cultural experiences, which many people, let alone deaf people, would never get.

Kyle: Indeed – and that I think is very valuable – for me, they are the news to what is going on in the world. I worked with many Libyans, and they paint a different picture of the Middle East/North Africa than is what is publicised – the media is not interested in one single person’s thoughts – the unspoken majority if you like.

I didn’t know before coming to Libya that people from the north east really, really, really don’t like the people from the south-west – and they would fight like crazy.

Tony: What about deaf people? Have you met any in your work, or on your travels? Apart from me that is! [Tony gives smug smile]

Kyle: I haven’t met any in my line of work. I did meet a lone deaf traveller from Finland at Hong Kong airport; he was coming back from the Philippines and spoke excellent English. That was about it. To be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t see any more, especially seeing how many backpackers and tourists go to South East Asia.

It did strike me that in the country I work in now, it is such a poor country that a deaf person there would not have any hearing aids, or possibly access to education that included sign language. So if a local staff is deaf, his disability would be invisible or hidden. There are around 200-250 local staff, so it’s not like it is a small office and the vast majority of them work away from my field office.

Tony: Do you feel isolated because of your deafness?

Kyle: No not at all. Growing up, I don’t know any other deaf people. It isn’t any different now. I don’t see being deaf is a cultural thing like others do. I know that’s pretty controversial, but to me, there’s more to life than just being deaf. I’m not a big fan of being in like-for-like group – I tend to socialise with very different people.

Tony: It brings me back to the question of networking. How do you maintain a network, especially a professional network?

Kyle: Hmm, trying to figure out how to answer that… Technology is your friend here. Social network sites are great at keeping in touch with people – even those who don’t keep people posted about what they are up to. But one has to be careful how you use such sites, if you like to say you are drunk seven days a week, it’s not going to go down well with professionals.

That said, it can bring out another side to you, especially if you don’t know some of the colleagues well enough and one day one of them comes in and say “I didn’t know you like to go off-roading – I do too”.

But I have never put my boss on my social networks!

Tony: Yes, I quite agree, but the salient point is, the professional networking that can be important to one’s career.

Kyle: Other tools are forums out there which you can relate to – it doesn’t have to be your line of work, for example, I regularly check a forum for frequent flyers – it is full of professionals whinging about flying, they range from CEOs to minimum wage workers and it is a fantastic pool of contacts.

As I touched on briefly earlier, professional networking has got me two career jobs. I’m not one who makes friends easily and I like to think I’m lucky for friends who have got me those jobs. I’m not saying they did favours with those companies, but it can be something as simple as merely alerting you as to what is out there.

That’s important, as there are as many different types of jobs as there are web pages

Tony: Sure. But it is still important to network, for employment and career opportunities as well as socials with peers.

Kyle: Yup, you just don’t know what colleagues have done in the past or indeed, the future – especially in the oil/gas sector but I think it’s true in other areas as well.

And you don’t know what will happen in the future, you might decide to do something radically different and a colleague from a distant past has knowledge/experience to guide you or simply want to do the same thing and join in.

Some of the class mates from university, I’d have never pegged as being IT literate enough to use Excel efficiently enough to do some serious quality control checks, and they are now writing Visual Basic scripts and I’m learning from them rather than me telling them how to plug in a mouse.

Tony: Harking back to an earlier comment you made, regarding your life as a work in progress you see enjoying your life and the work you do as your career rather than the actual job u r doing?

Kyle: Yes, enjoying the work is much more important to me, than just executing the job. Anyone can execute a job, especially after training. It’s another thing to enjoy it, appreciate it or take pride in it. For me, I will do a job or career as long as I’m enjoying it – yet conscious that one day I may decide something else is more enjoyable.

Tony: So your choice of study was prompted by the prospect of travelled?

Kyle: My Geoscience degree?

Tony: Yes.

Kyle: I’ve always liked studying the earth since I was a wee brat; I like to know what our planet is doing underneath our feet and homes. The prospects of travel certainly helped to influence that decision. I imagine if I was more a touchy feely sort of bloke and want to do some kind of welfare/teaching, I’d be working in the tourism industry (did that) or doing TEFLs [Teaching English as a Foreign Language] around the world.

I make a conscious effort to look out for opportunities that provide ample travel.

Tony: I get quite an impression that your deafness is no barrier at all to your life and work. Do you think of yourself as a role model for other deaf people?

Kyle: No as I said before, I don’t see deafness as a big deal – I am very much a ‘just get on with it’ person. Barriers do come up, but I deal with it and move on or find an alternative. Everyone has their own quirks and challenges; I don’t see myself as any different.

Tony: And one last question, if I may? How do your work colleagues and superiors deal with your deafness, or you as a deaf person, as the case may be?

Kyle: It’s hard to answer that question, mostly because I’m quite stubborn – deal with it or go away. That said, no one really has any issues with my deafness. The crews being such a diverse group of people, many who don’t fully grasp English, the business language, people are more patient and tolerant.

I find if I don’t understand that person, then 90% of the staff don’t either. If it was something important, he’ll come back and make himself understood, to me or anyone else! Usually they gesture, draw or point to something that needs doing.

I’m also used to repeating myself – and in different ways, usually simplifying on each attempt in any situation, and this skill works well here with those who do not speak English as their main language.

One caveat – don’t expect things to be written down, many only know English as spoken, not as written, especially those who aren’t familiar with the Latin alphabet (most of Asia, Indian sub-continent, Middle East and North Africa and Russia). Who’s the hardest to understand? Australians, French and Siberians!

On the whole, it’s a more tolerant environment without people being over touchy feely or overcompensating like your average social worker tends to.

Tony: Kyle, I think we’ll leave it there. Thanks very much for your time. Mate, it’s been a pleasure.

Kyle: No problems Tone. The pleasure is all mine! But please, no more Blue Tongue Lizards!