Pawley's Island resident named Marietta College's 2018 Distinguished Alumna

by Tom Perry

Marietta, Ohio (10/22/2018) — Peg Howell '77, the first woman petroleum engineer to drill oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and now an advocate for stopping drilling off the Atlantic coast, recently received the Distinguished Alumna award from her alma mater, Marietta College.

Howell, of Pawley's Island, South Carolina, was honored during the Marietta College Alumni Association Awards ceremony on Saturday, October 13th.

The first female Petroleum Engineering student at Marietta College, Howell went on to earn an MBA from Harvard in 1984. She worked for years in the energy industry and in 1994 she started the Howell Consulting Group to serve as a business consultant and leadership coach to Fortune 500 companies.

Now she spends a great deal of time working to educate legislators on why Atlantic coast states should not permit offshore drilling.

"So, (former department chair) Elmer (Templeton) was right. With a Petroleum Engineering degree, I could be successful doing whatever I wanted to," she said. "Little did I know that I would become a spokesperson against the industry that had brought me up."

Watch a video of Peg Howell's speech.

Located in Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, Marietta College is a four-year liberal arts college. Tracing its roots to the Muskingum Academy back in 1797, the College was officially chartered in 1835. Today Marietta College serves a body of 1,200 full-time students. The College offers 49 majors and is consistently ranked as one of the top regional comprehensive colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, as well as one of the nation's best by Forbes.com. Marietta was selected seventh in the nation according to the Brookings Institution's rankings of colleges by their highest value added, regardless of major.

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