Geologist, engineer, and petroleum prospector. Rand began his career by making a geological survey of Santa Cruz Island during the 1920s, which caused the complete revision of previous surveys conducted between 1855 and 1875. Rand pursued a career not in academia but in the oil industry. Utilizing new methods of geophysical prospecting, he conducted surveys for Shell Oil during the 1930s and1940s in Alabama and Florida, and eventually for Union Oil in Santa Barbara, where he settled in the late 1940s. Rand continued his work in the oil industry during the 1950s. He began to patent his devices for coring the sediment on the ocean floor, and in the early 1950s he started his own company, Submarex, to use a technique "the first of its kind" to drill the ocean floor from an anchored vessel. Rand was also involved in many large-scale drilling and engineering projects. He was a prominent member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In the 1960s he was chosen as the first director of the Deep Sea Drilling Project at Scripps Institution, but had to leave after a year to attend to his ill wife.