Mandy Trahan’s walls are lime green and adorned with artwork. An iPod serenades her from a set of speakers with a “morning playlist.” Little here would clue observers in to Trahan’s occupation: She’s a landman.

“The profession–if you’re in it, you’re called a landman,” she said, from a Jefferson Street office accented with an over-sized beanbag chair. “People always make a joke, and say, ‘Well, aren’t you a landlady? Aren’t you a landwoman?’ That’s not proper terminology. If you’re male or female, you’re still a landman, and I hope that it never changes.”

Trahan, a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, owns her own petroleum land brokerage company, Mantra Land Services. Here she works as a landman, where she works with oil and gas companies to research and negotiate for the use of land in on-shore drilling projects.

Though she has been working a full-time job, Trahan, 31, has also been at least a part-time student. After high school, she said she spent a few semesters in college and decided it wasn’t for her–at least at the time.

“I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to do at the young age of 18 or 19,” said Trahan. “I wasn’t really focused on my grades. They were really in the toilet.”

Trahan said after she left school and became a landman, she still didn’t return to school because “the money was so great,” and she didn’t need to return.

“[Being a landman] was a job I stumbled into,” she said. “It didn’t really hold any particular meaning to me, and I felt like not finishing school was just unfinished business.”

Trahan said she felt like a college degree was just “something she needed to have,” so she went back to school, eventually ending up as an English literature major after trying her hand at general studies, political science and journalism.

“I really just picked it based on what classes were available and what didn’t require a lot of math,” she said, laughing. “I guess I gravitated toward English classes because I always loved reading and I always loved literature, and I always came away from those courses with a deeper understanding of, I guess, life in general.”

“I think some people probably wonder,” she said, “‘What’s an oil field girl doing in a class like this?’”

Trahan said she had been encouraged by some of her professors to continue writing and pursue further education, but she planned to continue her career as a landman for at least the immediate future. She said the company she founded, Mantra, was less than a year old, and it is “really building up steam.” Eventually, she said, would return to the university and pursue a master’s degree, but for now she and collegiate life would go their separate ways.

Trahan said that her life as a landman in the “real world” was worlds apart from the life and perspective of the average English major she shared classes with.

“It’s a totally different universe,” she said. “I would probably have skipped lunch that day, because I was under pressure to finish a certain tract of land, get the contract prepared, get the check cut, drive out to the country, get the thing signed, rush back in, barely make it to class, and I’d gone through this really stressful, pragmatic intensified real-world day, where we were really trying to accomplish something, we were trying to build this rig, and we were trying to find the petroleum and market it.

“It was this heavy-handed, industrial sort of process that we were working as a part of, and I’d get to class, and they would be talking about all these sort of really out-there, nebulous topics, like transcendentalism. [...] It was just really strange, and I thought just as much as I couldn’t comprehend some of what they were talking about, because I didn’t have the vocabulary and history, they would have had no idea what it would be like to be in the real world, working really hard to accomplish a pragmatic task. It was fun, though.”

She said she had to drop many of her classes because she ended up working on high-profile high-pressure projects, and couldn’t handle the workload, but she persevered.

“Because my job was so demanding,” she said, “sometimes I could take one class per semester, sometimes as many as three, but that was about max.”

Trahan is currently in her last semester at UL Lafayette, and enrolled in her final class: English 327, or script writing. She said her college career has taken her 21 semesters over 14 years, including her post-high school semesters.

Trahan said she would miss her classes, as they really “add another dimension” to her life, and she enjoyed having them as a “hobby.”

“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” she said.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under features, vermilion.