Ernest H. Cockrell is chairman of Cockrell Interests LLC in Houston, which includes oil and gas, investment, ranching, and farming entities. And, he is president and director of The Cockrell Foundation, which stems from his parents’ generosity. He joined the family flagship, Cockrell Oil Corp., at age 23 and spent 37 years serving and running the corporation until it was sold in 2004.

He earned an engineering degree and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1981 he was named a Distinguished Graduate of the UT College of Engineering . In 2003 he was inducted into the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business Hall of Fame, and in 2010 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of UT Austin.

His father, Ernest D., was also a UT graduate. In 2007, the UT Board of Regents renamed the school’s college of engineering the Cockrell School of Engineering after his father.

Quite active in Houston, Ernie was a founder of Amegy Bank and a director of the Pennzoil Co. He has served on dozens of community and nonprofit boards, including the MD Anderson Cancer Center Board of Visitors, the Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, The Methodist Hospital System, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where visitors flock to the Cockrell Butterfly Center. And he is a member of the All-American Wildcatters Association.

Investor When you were a child, did your dad take you out to rigs?

Cockrell I did go a lot with him to the fields and drilling rigs in both Texas and Louisiana. My first job though was with Holmes Drilling Co. in Houston, where I cleaned rotary tables and rebuilt small engines. In college I worked for the family company as a roustabout, a pumper and a roughneck. So I got grease under my fingernails before getting a degree.

Investor And after graduating from UT?

Cockrell I was a field and drilling engineer for a while and worked as a reservoir engineer for several years. Dad died very young, age 57. At around 30 or 31 years old, I became executive vice president and then president. We had about 50 employees at the time.

Investor To what extent are you involved in the Cockrell School now?

Cockrell I’m involved on the school’s advisory board. The Cockrell Foundation established an endowment at the UT Austin engineering school for scholarships and professorial chairs. This year we have about 350 students on scholarship and we have funded 30 chairs. Over the past 40 years, about 2,400 students have gone to the engineering school on those scholarships.

All of this is a result of my father’s bequest and his foresight. He received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in petroleum engineering from UT; in fact, he was in the first petroleum engineering class.

Every year we give a dinner for our scholarship students and I speak to them about their responsibility to give back to the school. I’ll also talk about managing family businesses from time to time.

Investor To what extent is Cockrell still active in the business?

Cockrell We sold the operating company in 2004. Periodically we’d build up assets and then sell. The last time we sold, we made the decision to sell everything but the fee lands and royalties. So we no longer operate or generate prospects, but we do take working interests with a few operators we know and trust. It keeps our hand in the game. There are a lot of opportunities.

Investor Education is a passion of yours. Tell us about Reasoning Mind Inc.

Cockrell I’d observed that many college-bound students weren’t prepared for the higher-level math they needed for college, much less for careers in engineering and science. Our family was interested in doing something about this at the K-12 level, but had never come across anything we felt was worthwhile.

I had met a Russian couple who immigrated to Houston and we became friends…he said he was appalled at the level of math knowledge of American students, and had an idea to do something…

His idea, which became Reasoning Mind, is a program that uses the Russian math curriculum adapted to our culture, is web-based, and uses artificial intelligence to teach each student individually. The students receive instant feedback, as do the teachers. The program covers grades 2 through 6 and we’re adding Algebra I and II. The data shows it to be very effective. We have a little more than 70,000 students in seven states on it now and it’s expanding nicely.

Investor As an engineer, were you skeptical of the resource plays at first?

Cockrell I was. I am especially surprised that the oil legs of these reservoirs have performed as well as they have due to the size of the crude oil molecules. It’s pretty phenomenal. We were historically a Gulf Coast and Gulf of Mexico company, but we now have direct and indirect interests in the Williston and Permian, and in some other resource plays.

One sees a whole new area of reservoir engineering developing and, of course, the improvements in the mechanical side of actually drilling the wells is extraordinary. I do feel some of the recovery numbers are on the high side given present science and technology, but I believe recoveries will improve with time as the understanding of the reservoir mechanics improves.