An Inupiat/Korean with family roots in Point Hope, a Northwest Alaska village on the Chukchi Sea coast, Omnik was raised in Anchorage. She excelled in science and math at East High School, graduating third in her class of 300, and at the urging of her parents went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a degree in chemical engineering.

Suege Omnik, 25, returned to Alaska to work for ASRC Energy Services after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in chemical engineering. Omnik is engineering designs for modules that extract heavy oil from North Slope oil wells. Photo/Rob Stapleton/AJOC

Now Omnik, at 25, has brought her skills home to Alaska. She is working with ASRC Energy Services, a major Alaska-based oilfield service company.

Along this path, Omnik did everything right: Mentorships through the Anchorage School District program, a University of Alaska Anchorage "college bridging" program for aspiring Alaska Native engineering and science students, summer internships with BP and later ConocoPhillips, and MIT.

Engineering was her chosen career but Omnik went back and forth for a period as to whether she would study mechanical, structural or chemical engineering, she said. Chemical won out in the end because it seemed more interesting.

"In civil engineering we work with structural objects; mechanical engineering involves things with moving parts, but chemical engineering deals with what things are made of and how it all fits together," she said.

Omnik was first introduced to the oil and gas industry through a high school mentor, and she was intrigued.

"I liked science and math in high school, and I was good at it. I've always wanted to help Alaska, and working in the petroleum industry offers me huge opportunities to do that," she said.

With an MIT degree, Omnik would have had no trouble landing a good job anywhere. She chose to come home to Alaska, partly because of professional opportunities at ASRC, where she is also a shareholder, and partly because her family is here.

ASRC was also attractive because the corporation's energy services subsidiary is engaged in projects that apply leading-edge technology, and Omnik is right in the middle of that. It was a good fit because the corporation is anxious to encourage shareholders to work in professional positions.

Working for ASRC is also a family affair. Omnik's sister, Charlotte, is the business manager for the company's Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk River and Oooguruk oil field support unit. Her father, Robert Omnik, manages the company's warehouse services at the Kuparuk field. When Omnik flies to the North Slope to work on ASRC Energy projects her father sometimes picks her up at the Kuparuk airfield and drives her to her work site.

The professional challenges mean a lot. Omnik is part of BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.'s team working on ways to commercially produce the massive heavy oil resource of the North Slope. Heavy oil, as well as natural gas, is considered the long-term future for the North Slope petroleum industry. There are huge deposits of the thick, gooey stuff right around the existing producing fields of the Slope, but it is not yet known that it can be economically produced.

The BP team Omnik works with is engaged in testing pilot production wells and processing facilities to see if the oil can be produced.

Omnik works on other projects for BP, too. She is often made a part of BP's "hazards and operability" reviews that the company routinely does with new projects. Omnik is the "scribe" for the team, trained to work with specialized programs to document scenarios of possible problems and solutions. The purpose of the exercise is to spot problems before something is built.

Women do the math

These days it's no big deal for women to be working in advanced technology fields, for women to be process engineers - which is Omnik's job title - or even to hold advance technology degrees from leading universities like MIT. About half of her chemical engineering classmates at MIT were women, Omnik said.

MIT may be unusual, however. Nationally the percentage of female students in university engineering studies runs to about 15 percent of all engineering students, according to Fred Villa, the University of Alaska's vice president for workforce development. Alaska is doing better than the national average with about 20 percent to 22 percent of students in the University of Alaska's engineering studies programs being female, Villa said.

The higher ratio of women to men in engineering fits the university's general profile in that there are more women than men enrolled compared to national averages. About 61 percent of all University of Alaska students are female compared to the national average of about 55 percent enrolled in universities, Villa said.

The university has no ready explanation as to why more women than men are in higher education in Alaska, although there are programs that encourage women to pursue studies in fields that are nontraditional, he said.

For example, five of nine students in aviation maintenance classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage are women. Some 12 percent to 15 percent of students in welding classes are women.

In science and technology fields, however, there are deliberate efforts underway to get more girls interested. Melissa Mormilo, a civil engineer at DOWL-HKM in Anchorage, is president of the Alaska chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, which works through Girl Scouts and other youth organizations to encourage middle and high school girls to consider science, math and engineering.

"We really try to reach girls in middle school because that's the age where they start to think that math and science isn't so cool, and that it's something only the boys do," she said.

One program the society helps with is an annual "Girls' Math Experience" workshop, usually held on a Saturday, where professional women in different fields explain how mathematics is woven through many professions. The most recent workshop included a musician, a vulcanologist and a crime scene investigator, Mormilo said.

University of Alaska engineering professor Herb Schroeder says there is a trend is toward more young women moving into technical fields like engineering, but that there are still challenges.

"Young women and girls face basically the same problem that minorities face in that that often someone, at some time, discourages them. Usually it's a teacher or counselor who tells them 'oh, don't take that course because it's too hard,' This can be very subtle but it's still a discouragement," Schroeder said.

When the university first started its Alaska Native in Science and Engineering Program (ANSEP), which reaches out to promising young Alaska Native youths interested in science and engineering, Schroeder found the majority of applications came from young women.

"I really can't explain it," he said.

The gender imbalance is since been corrected, and is now more even between women and men.

Passing the opportunities

For Omnik, there is no mystery as to her success. It was hard work in high school, something many adolescents shy away from, and at the university. Her early inspiration came through a mentorship at Emerald Consulting Group (now Doyon/Emerald), an environmental consulting firm.

"I was able to work with some sophisticated programs and models, which introduced me to chemical engineering. I was able to help with a small project for BP, too, which was my first exposure to oil and gas," Omnik said.

After graduating from East High, Omnik was able to attend the summer "bridge" program for Alaska Native high school students set to begin engineering studies in the fall.

That summer, while not in calculus class, Omnik did an internship with BP and was given challenging work modeling water injection rates in the underground reservoir at the Milne Point field on the North Slope, a procedure used to boost oil recovery.

While studying at MIT, Omnik was able to come home during summers and work in other internships, including one with ConocoPhillips to model underground reservoir pressures in the Kuparuk River field.

Omnik is bringing the loop full circle now. She wants to use her experience to nurture other young people with interests in math and science, by mentoring high school students.

Tim Bradner can be reached at timbradner.@alaskajournal.com.