Jogo There is no doubt in my mind that if you want to work for an oil company you should take the petroleum masters. With a mining engineering background you have few options off the bat work wise- you can do geotechnical work like tailings pond design, or you can work on oil sand mine design/exploitation but these jobs are slowly going to dry up as the oil sands moves to SAGD (thermal drilling processes, look it up).
A petroleum masters will expose you to a whole new skillset- drilling, production, reservoir, completions, petrophysics (well logging), geoscience, stimulation/ EOR, Pressure transient analysis (well testing), surface facilities... The list goes on, and you'll be much more marketable in a rapidly changing landscape in both conventional and unconventional plays.
Guys I know here with mining engineering backgrounds are always passed over for petroleum engineering backgrounds because the companies can spend less time training them, and as a foreigner you are already going to be at a disadvantage in a down economy.
My two cents.....
Edit- what is it that you'd like to do in this industry? Maybe you have different goals. Fast money or a long term grind to big bucks? Conventional or unconventional?
A petroleum masters will expose you to a whole new skillset- drilling, production, reservoir, completions, petrophysics (well logging), geoscience, stimulation/ EOR, Pressure transient analysis (well testing), surface facilities... The list goes on, and you'll be much more marketable in a rapidly changing landscape in both conventional and unconventional plays.
Guys I know here with mining engineering backgrounds are always passed over for petroleum engineering backgrounds because the companies can spend less time training them, and as a foreigner you are already going to be at a disadvantage in a down economy.
My two cents.....
Edit- what is it that you'd like to do in this industry? Maybe you have different goals. Fast money or a long term grind to big bucks? Conventional or unconventional?