About Me

Hi,

My name is Mark Lusty Jensen. I am a Danish guy who recently moved to the United States. Even though I have been here since early June 2021, I am still trying to figure out where all the bike lanes are at. I have been riding my bike to school and work all my life in Denmark, but it seems a lot more difficult here. I lived in a medium-sized town 10 miles from the city center of Copenhagen. I am the oldest of two children. My sister is 5½ years younger than I am. My dad is a carpenter and my mom a nurse.

As a young kid I tried a lot of different sports, some with more success than others. But there was one sport in particular that just got me. Swimming. I started swimming long before I was able to decide what sport I wanted to do. My dad signed me up for baby classes when I was four months old, and from there I never looked back. During my teens, I tried other sports, as mentioned. One of which was soccer, and another was track and field (not that I was a runner. But I was decent with a javelin for my age). But I kept coming back to swimming. I didn’t stop swimming before I was in my early twenties. At that point, I had been doing it competitively since I was 9.

I have always been close to my dad, and his being a carpenter influenced both my choice of the type of high school I wanted to go, and where I went to university. At 13 years old, I went to work with my dad for the first time. It was a school holiday, and we were going to a friend of his vacation house to build a new covered entry. It took me exactly 2 hours out of the three-day project, and I was hooked. I wanted to be in construction (or so I thought). For the next many, many years, I worked with my dad on every school holiday, and on weekends if time and swimming allowed it. In that time, I got to be part of building new fire stations, operation rooms at hospitals, flipping houses and much more. But my dad always told me not to become a carpenter. It would be a waste of a good head. I am sure every parent would say that to their child. So, I decided to follow his advice and become a civil engineer in the construction industry. So, out of high school I went for it. I only applied to one university (Technical University of Denmark), and one line of study (Civil Engineer). And luck had it, I got in. Everything was good, I was studying what I wanted, and my dad even worked at the university as well, so I would run into him from time to time. The summer between 4th and 5th semester I was sitting at home trying to pick the classes I wanted for the next semester. I had already done most of the mandatory classes. So, I was trying to pick some elective classes. And this is where my plans on becoming a civil engineer in the construction field changed (I just didn’t know it yet). I came across this “Introduction to drilling” class and figured that sounded interesting, so I signed up. By the third of the thirteen classes in this “Introduction to drilling”, I was hooked, and I knew this field was what I wanted to pursue. I found the whole drilling and logging thing very interesting. But at that point, I only had one semester left of my bachelor's in civil engineering. So, I finished that. But instead of going for a master's in construction, I applied for a master's in petroleum engineering. And spend the following two years getting a master's in petroleum engineering.

In late summer of 2018, with half a year left of my masters, I met this American woman on holiday in Denmark. Little did I know that this woman would go on to become my wife, and that two and a half years later I would have sold almost everything I owned and stand at Copenhagen airport with a one-way ticket to Denver. So, 2019 was spent working as a consultant because that was the type of job that would give me the maximum amount of freedom to travel to the United States to be with my then girlfriend's now wife. Then, as everyone knows, COVID-19 happened in early 2020, and a long-distance relationship became a lot more difficult. But we stuck it out, and finally, on June 10th of 2021, I moved to the United States permanently.

When I am not working on keeping up to date with the petroleum industry, at the moment I’m reading the book “Machine Learning Guide for Oil and Gas Using Python” which can be found on Barnes & Noble here. You can find me on my bike on the roads between Boulder and Longmont, or running on the trails around Boulder reservoir, training for the next triathlon or running race, hiking with my wife and our dog, mountain biking, skiing, renovating houses, or carving houses.