A Worthy Winner

Following a poll amongst his fellow students, Øystein Utbjoe Andersland has been elected "Best student, Subsea Technology - class of 2014–2017". Øystein is 23 years old and comes from Stord.

Øystein was hended the award "Student of the Year, Subsea Technology" at UTC 2017 on 20 June.

Owe Hagesæther, CEO at GCE Subsea, congratulates Øystein: – He is really a deserving prize winner. In addition to very good grades and academic skills he has also shown that he has an open-minded and sharing personality.

Tone Røkenes, Assistant Professor and Øystein’s study coordinator at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) has followed Øystein for three years, and says that one of his main strengths is that he is always seeking new knowledge.

– Øystein always asks many critical questions, which I regard as a good feature. He is also very helpful, and very popular with his fellow students. He has shown very good academic skills, but at the same time he is a very down to earth kind of person. He is a very worthy winner of this price, she concludes.

GCE Subsea and SpareBank 1 SR-Bank established the award to contribute to a good study- and learning environment. – The Subsea Technology Bachelor Programme has one of the best educational environments in the country, continues Hagesæther.

Interests Span from Music to Robotics.

Øystein is 23 years old and comes from Stord which is well known for its strong HUB for Norwegian offshore construction, with the famous offshore yard Kværner Stord amid a large cluster of oil service companies. Before he attended university, Øystein attended Stord VGS (High School level), with music as specialisation. In addition to music, diving is one of his main hobbies.

– The first time I learned about the Subsea Technology Bachelor Programme at HVL was through a brochure from an education fair, says Øystein, – and as I looked more into this the interest grew upon me. The thought of learning more about our world class subsea technology and all the amazing challenges we can solve in this respect appealed to me.

We asked Øystein about his expectations for his studies; – My expectations were high going into the study period, and now, looking back, I must say that they were met. Overall, the level of the teachers and the topics has been very high, constituting a sound platform for further studies and career.

– We had a very good team spirit in our class at Campus Straume. A small campus like that made it very easy to get to know and interact with all the fellow students both professionally and socially. We had a fantastic culture for sharing and collaboration, which in the end also made the exam preparations more like a big happy team effort than individual exam memorisation.

Some of my classmates have already got subsea jobs

The oil and gas downturn has of course affected the job market for subsea students, and Øystein’s comment on this is: – It is much tougher now than I had foreseen, but my impression is that the worst is over now, and some of my classmates have already got subsea jobs.

– In the fifth semester I had the opportunity to be an exchange student at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I chose many automation and robotics related topics. This has inspired me to continue further down that path, so I have now applied for a 2-year Master’s programme in Cybernetics and Robotics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), says Øystein.

On a final note Øystein states that he thinks the subsea study opens for many possibilities: – We have learned about everything from automation to technology management. This gives a good engineering base for core subsea technology for offshore oil and gas as well as a broad foundation for a career within other ocean space industries, and even some land based industries. For example, in my bachelor’s thesis our team carried out a deductive conceptual study into the feasibility of wireless UUV’s for inspection of cage nets in fish farms.