This yearâs summer project in Statoil, which provides vacation jobs for students, is now under way and has been expanded to include work on international projects.
These assignments provide a supplement to the traditional focus on projects relating to research and technology.
A total of 80 students from international universities and colleges have been selected from roughly 800 applicants for the eighth of these annual programmes.
For the first time, the summer project is based at the group's head office in Stavanger. It is a collaboration between Statoil, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, the University of Stavanger, the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, the Norwegian School of Management (BI) in Oslo and various international academic institutions.
Many of the 19 projects being pursued by the students are multicultural. In one, eight different nationalities are represented among the 15 participants.
âThis international project in the global exploration cluster (GEX) will be really exciting and challenging,â says Lise Førre, who is responsible for the 2005 programme.
The projects are future-oriented and concern Statoil's four priority areas: internationalisation, integrated operations, world-class projects and the environment.
In the different projects the students will look into new ways of working within these priority areas.
The opening ceremony of the eight-week scheme was conducted in English for the first time because of the international participation.
For the same reason, work in a number of the projects will be carried out in the same language.
The students are deployed at head office in Stavanger, the Trondheim research centre, the operations office at Stjørdal outside Trondheim and the Mongstad refinery north of Bergen.
All the projects being pursued are relevant for the groupâs commercial operations, reports Ms Førre. âTheyâre very forward-looking and deal directly with our priority areas.â
The programmeâs goal is to improve cooperation between Statoil and university-level academic institutions, and to give students experience of problem-solving in a large industrial group.