Lucy: Mineral Engineering Student

During COVID, Lucy was in high school, taking online classes like everyone else.

One room over, her dad was working from home. She could always overhear him taking calls, so she'd ask him jokingly, "How's the project going?"

One day, he offered to show her the project he was working on. As a mineral engineer, it was his job to extract valuable metals and minerals from rocks. She got pretty curious about it. She kept asking questions about the job, and the answers made her even more curious.

Lucy on campus during her mineral engineering degree.

What started as a joke soon became a fascination for her. Lucy went to university and studied mineral engineering. When she had the chance to do a co-op program at a mine, she brought her curiosity along for the ride.

After her first two years studying mineral engineering, Lucy wasn't sure if she'd made the right decision. "I was skeptical. Classes were really theoretical," she explains. While she didn't mind lectures, lab classes, and coursebooks, she wanted something more.

One day, her class took a field trip to a mine. It was her first experience underground, and it opened her eyes.

"Everything started to come together for me when I toured the mine," she says as she reflects on the field trip. "I started connecting everything I was learning in class to how it works in the real world. I realized that everything I'm learning is for a reason."

She knew then and there that mining was her future. When the opportunity for a summer co-op program at McEwen's Fox Complex came up, Lucy dove in head first.

The entrance to one of McEwen's Fox Complex mines.

Lucy worked for a summer in the assay lab at the Fox Complex mill. It's a facility that supports recovery, a process that separates gold from rock.

A McEwen employee working in the assay lab at the Fox Complex.

The assay lab team is super important to a gold mine. It's their job to prove that the mine can actually recover valuable gold from all that rock.

Using their scientific knowledge, they conduct all kinds of tests on ore samples with fire and chemical experiments. The tests eliminate the guesswork with hard data.

The assay lab team then analyzes test data and sends daily reports to the mine. The reports tell the mine how much gold it's recovering and how much is lost in the process.

It's a demanding place to work, but a great opportunity for a young engineer like Lucy.

"It was my first 'big girl job' in engineering. I was super nervous," Lucy says. "I thought I had to know everything."

When supervisors quizzed her about different tests, she quickly realized how much she didn't know. But instead of getting discouraged, she used it as an opportunity to fill in her knowledge gaps.

"A lot of people focus on what they know, and they latch on to it. But I always ask myself: what do I NOT know, and how can I connect it with what I do know?"

With a learning mindset, she took the initiative and committed to improving her skills.

The most important lesson Lucy learned in her time at the mine: "Effective communication is the pinnacle of the industry."

If she didn't know something? She asked someone on the team. "I used to think that asking questions meant, Hey, look at me! I don't know what I'm doing! I thought it was a big red flag," she explains.

"But asking questions got me to think about my role in a deeper way. And my team was so open and helpful. I got so many great answers."

For Lucy, good communication wasn't just about asking questions. It was a two-way street that meant listening to others. When her coworkers in the lab would talk about their daily tasks, Lucy would turn her chair around and "lock in" on their conversation. "I wanted to learn everything I could about their jobs and how they did them. Maybe I'll need to know those things someday."

Most importantly, she listened to feedback from her supervisors. In meetings, she took their constructive criticism to heart and kept asking questions about her performance. Then she'd ask herself: "What have I learned, and how can I adapt my work so I can get the job done better?"

In the end, she wasn't content to just absorb all these discussions. She actively used them to improve her skills. "I can't praise enough how much I learned from my co-op team."

You're working in an assay lab at a mine. You're preparing a daily report after a test. You look at some data from a test result, but it's confusing to you.

What should you do?

A. Just leave the data out of the report. If it's confusing to you, nobody else will understand it.

B. Put the data in the report without thinking about it. Someone else can analyze it.

C. Ignore the data. Keep doing the test until the data makes sense.

D. Ask your supervisor: "Can we review this data together?"

Bit by bit, Lucy built up her skills by asking questions, listening, and adapting her work — and her team took notice.

As she confidently showed her abilities, supervisors gained more and more trust in her. One day, they asked her to run a test on her own. It was a success!

From then on, she could run tests independently. "I was excited that I could do the tests," Lucy recounts, "but it was so satisfying to know that my team trusted me."

Her team trusted her so much that they asked her to write a report with suggestions for improving how the lab operates.

Lucy is just one of a growing number of young women who are entering the mining field.

Still, only 16% of the Canadian mining workforce are women. Sometimes on the job, she was the only woman in the room. But she didn't let this intimidate her.

She has advice for other women who want to join the industry: "Keep your head high, and your voice loud. Don't shrink in the room. You're definitely here for a reason: you're smart and you know what you're doing! Your voice and opinions are just as important as everyone else's."

Lucy's experience shows just how important it is to take charge of your own learning. Building your knowledge and connecting it to key skills will empower you on your mining journey.

Are you ready to learn like Lucy?