Mining Engineering
Ben
Role: UQ Mining Engineering Student - Vacation Work
Company: Xstrata Coal
Courtesy of QRC
To be honest, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to study engineering, however mining engineering interested me because of the opportunities I had heard about.
In second semester, I applied for mining engineering vac work to earn some money and satisfy my curiosity.
As a result I landed work at Xstrata Coal in the open-cut sector of Newlands Coal Mine in Glenden, a few hours west of Mackay. They offered me a base salary of $52,000.
Xstrata Coal paid to fly me up to Mackay in early December and my accommodation was a share house with two other vac work students about my age. The house was fully air-conditioned, had a huge TV, a phone and we all got our own rooms with double beds.
On that first day I had a look around Glenden, which wasn't like I thought it was going to be. I had this idea of what a mining town was going to be like in my mind but the reality was better. We didn't have to cook any of our meals for the 12 weeks. Apart from making our own sandwiches for lunch after breakfast — all our other meals were full-on buffet style! The food was awesome!
Our house was about a 25 minute drive from the mine. Every morning we would get a lift in with our supervisor and be at site at about 6:30/7:00am and we would work through till about 5pm.
My most favourite job was when I was given a time and motion study to do over a couple of weeks. The mine had an electrical shovel that was under-performing and they needed me to find out why.
So I went out in the Land Cruiser by myself to observe this shovel. After two days of gathering data, I went back to the office to collate it I narrowed it down to an operator problem and wrote a full report.
My supervisor was really pleased with my work. He gave me an awesome reference and invited me back to work after I graduated.
We worked a normal Monday to Friday week and had the weekends free. On the weekends that we stayed in Glenden, we would go to the pub, swim at the pool or play golf — they had a pretty good course up there. At Christmas time I flew back home to Brisbane for 10 days, this was a great break. We also did about four trips up to Arlie Beach.
Xstrata coal put so much faith in me and responsibility into my hands. I was worried that I would be up there washing trucks and sweeping floors, but they actually gave me real engineering projects that were relevant and treated me like a real engineer.
I met a lot of cool people up there and made mates who I still keep in contact with. I also got to talk to mining engineer graduates, which gave me a great insight into what I can expect too.
