Couple creates geology scholarship after oil industry career took them around the world

A Northwest Missouri State University alumnus and his wife have established a scholarship to support geology students through a gift to the Northwest Foundation.

The new George and Diana Kerns Scholarship will award an annual $1,000 scholarship, beginning for the 2026-27 academic year. To be eligible, individuals must be enrolled as full-time undergraduate students at Northwest with a minimum 2.5 GPA and a major in the geology discipline.

Though George did not earn his degree in geology, his 36-year career in the oil industry centered on interpreting seismic data and drawing maps to inform oil drillers. Now retired, he and Diana want to assist students who aspire to work in similar fields. 

“That’s where it all began,” George said of the couple’s desire to help future Northwest students. “Then I got a job with Mobil. Then we had children and went overseas and saw the world. It all started at Northwest Missouri State. I received a lot at Northwest Missouri, so this is just my way of paying back.”

Newly married in 1960, George and Diana moved to Maryville, which led to George completing his bachelor’s degree at Northwest in 1963. Previously, he had spent four years in the U.S. Air Force as a radar mechanic and had logged more than 30 academic credit hours before his military discharge in 1960.

“I was going to try to get an engineering degree, and they didn’t have one at Northwest,” George said. “So I took all the math courses I could take and all the physics courses I could take, so basically I got a B.S. degree in physics and a B.S. degree in mathematics.”

For $35 a month, the couple secured housing in Vets Village, a neighborhood of apartments for married students located where the Garrett-Strong Science Building is today. George maintained janitorial jobs at a tractor dealer and at the former St. Francis Hospital in Maryville to help pay their rent and his tuition. Diana worked for Everett Brown, a longtime administrator at Northwest.

“Ours was right by the school farm and the railroad tracks,” George said of their apartment. “I remember the train used to go through there about 3 o’clock in the morning, and he’d toot the horn and wake everybody up. … We survived it. I didn’t sleep much.”

After graduating, George secured employment with Mobil Oil Corp. and was dispatched to Hobbs, New Mexico, as a junior geophysical engineer. Five months later, he was transferred.

“The manager said, ‘George, you’ve been transferred to Dallas,’ and I said, ‘Well, you told me I was going to be here three years,’” George recalled. “He said, ‘Welcome to the oil business.’”

Indeed, George’s work with Mobil took him throughout the world – from Dallas to Corpus Christi, to 28-day sea rotations to conduct seismic surveys of continental shelves. The latter work took him to parts of West Africa and Indonesia, ending with George, Diana and their three children spending five and a half years in Medan.

Subsequent assignments took George to Jakarta for three years and to Saudi Arabia to assist Aramco, though the family always returned to Dallas in between.

“When I retired in ’99, they made up a map of the world and showed I’d been to 69 different countries – all 50 states, around the world 12 times and visited six of the seven continents. I hadn’t been to Antarctica yet.”

While living in Dallas, Diana earned an associate degree in architecture and she designed hotels. Today, the couple shares time at their homes in Farmers Branch, Texas, and in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia.

To support the George and Diana Kerns Scholarship, visit iooitu.huameidangao.com/giving or make a gift to another Northwest fund by contacting the Office of University Advancement at 660.562.1248 or advance@huameidangao.com.