The Miami University geology department received a $5.3 million software package from Halliburton to place professional, state-of-the-art software on 11 of their computers, according to Associate Professor Brian Currie.
Currie provides students with access to this software in both his upper level and lower level classes as well as in research labs.
The software is called Geographix Discovery software and is almost identical to the software used by industry geologists, according to Currie.
"Essentially, it's the same software that industry geologists are using every day and our students are getting the opportunity to immerse themselves in it and become familiar with it," Currie said.
Geographix Discovery software is provided by the multi-national company, Halliburton, according to geology department chair, William Hart.
"In terms of the oil and gas industry, they are one of the largest support kind of organizations that provide a lot of technical oil field on-site expertise," Hart said.
Currie believes using this software will help his students with their professional goals.
"It's really great to have on a resume when they are applying for internships and future employment somewhere down the line where they can say I have experience with this software that the majority of folks in this industry are using," Currie said.
The geology department's focus on their students learning professional software is similar to other departments in the College of Arts and Science (CAS).
Junior Chelsea Fought, an interactive media studies minor, said she believes CAS does a good job of making professional software available to students.
"I think that the courses offered in the department do what they are supposed to do." Fought said. "If our school is known for offering these programs or opportunities to learn them and use them I think it would definitely benefit potential applicants."
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Hart and Currie said they are glad Halliburton chose to work with Miami over their other university applicants, despite the moderate size of the geology department.
"I know there are a limited amount of institutions world-wide that Halliburton and GeoGraphix interact with in this way," Hart said. "It's a really wonderful opportunity that we have at Miami to be one of those."
"It's usual for a university with a mid-size program to have such an extensive complement of the software so we are unique in that regard because we have a lot of stuff for the size of our department," Currie said.
According to Currie, the geology department has had similar software grants in the past but the grant they received this year allows students to use the software in more ways.
"This newest grant is actually a continuation of grants we have had in the past but given the success that we have had they decided to up the component that they had previously given us, and it's much more comprehensive and so the monetary value of the grant itself increased by an order of magnitude by this newest application," Currie said.
The $5.3 million value of the grant represents the cost of the software, not cash.
"We aren't receiving money," Hart said. "What we are receiving is a software package and a license for software and for the service and technical systems needed to make sure it operates properly."
Currie said the software will provide students with the opportunity to work with data in a way they could not with other software.
"In the past what we used the software for and what we had available was just primary visual data and compilation," Currie said. "What we have now with the newest grant, we actually have the ability to look at things much more detailed. We can start modeling the particular geology as it applies to different problems that we are working with."
The new version of the software was installed during the spring and the grant will last for the next three years, Currie said.
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