Roundtable with U.S. mining engineering department heads

A recruiting strategy that works: bringing in industry to share on-the-job experiences inspires students to want to work in mining. (Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech.) Those educating the next generation in the mining and underground sector have faced extenuating circumstances beyond normal technical challenges. Low enrollments, misunderstandings about what mining is and what it involves, misperceptions about mining and its effects on the environment, and ignorance of the numerous career opportunities in the field of mining have contributed to a precipitous downturn in enrollments. Many open positions with no trained pipeline of people to fill them have the mining and underground construction industry stressed too. This is a recurring theme. Every year teachers and those working in college and university guidance and counseling centers must bring enthusiasm and openmindedness as they guide students through an array of learning, decision making and options, all while the students are learning and making plans for their futures. This is no easy task in a normal school year, let alone the few that have followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of today’s youth are struggling with mental-health issues related to the isolation brought on by the pandemic. Studies show that this, coupled with social unrest, inflation, climate change and the financial burden of attending college today has added to the stressors many young people are facing. Mining Engineering recently held a roundtable discussion with four department heads at mining engineering schools around the United States, all of whom are new or in their first full year in the position. Each was asked to share their perspective and vision for their institutions. Participants included Charles Kocsis, chair of Mining Engineering and director of Mine Safety and Health at the University of Utah; Kray Luxbacher, department head of Mining and Geological Engineering and professor of Mining and Geological Engineering at the University of Arizona (UArizona); Aaron Christopher Noble, professor, department head and associate director, Center for Advanced Separation Technologies, Virginia Tech and Javad Sattarvand, chair of the Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno with facilitator Steven Schafrik, associate professor and director of graduate studies, Department of Mining Engineering, University of Kentucky. Each participant in the roundtable had a slightly different approach to recruiting students to their respective schools; each shared their vision for their institutions and recruiting strategies that have worked, both in the near term and for the future. Demand for workers The professors spoke of industry heads reaching out to them each spring, wondering how many students will be graduating in a given year, and whether they can hire them. The good news is that the students graduating with mining degrees are often faced with multiple job offers. At the University of Utah, Kocsis’ students often have many job offers before they have even graduated from school. Noble is one of those new to his role and would start in the new position eight days after the discussion took place. “I think the demand for talent is going to exceed our abilities to supply talent for several years. It terrifies me as someone who lives in this country and benefits from mineral resource production; lack of talent absolutely terrifies me. There is unmet demand for engineers in critical minerals, and that unmet need continues to grow,” he said. Mathematics skills One area that will need focus for helping students achieve is mathematics. Noble said that over the past three years, there has been a precipitous and unprecedented decline in the mathematics proficiency of inbound college students. “I’ve told our faculty we have to prepare ourselves for a generation of students that will have much less math proficiency than what they had five, 10 years ago,” he said. On this topic, Kocsis said, “We still need our mining engineers to do some math when they are designing systems, especially underground.” Luxbacher said, “We need both kinds of students, students that are excelling at math and statics and dynamics, but also those that excel at managing people.” “Our role is to take what we’ve been given and produce capable engineers, and in doing so, I think we have to think very carefully about our curriculum and how we mentor students, how we get students the help and support that they need, how we get them tutoring services, and how we get upperclassmen to buy into that and help with the younger students,” said Noble. UArizona recruiting initiatives The number one problem all the schools on the call are facing is low enrollments, but things are looking up for some, according to Luxbacher. Luxbacher has one academic year under her belt as department head at UArizona. “Tucson is definitely recognized as a mining technology hub,” she said. Luxbacher wants to play a major part in expanding that identity too, and sees UArizona as a mining technology research and innovation center, especially in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Mine design for the circular economy and an emphasis on tailings management are additional areas of interest, and she sees more of this type of work in demand in the future. UArizona has a tailings center it shares with the Colorado School of Mines and Colorado State University, and there are many legacy tailings facilities in and around the Tucson area that require management. This, coupled with new techniques in mineral processing and refinement, especially around copper and its byproducts, are key to the mining industry in Arizona. One of UArizona’s strategies around recruiting students involves its new school of Mining and Mineral Resources, which Luxbacher said brings many resources to the table in terms of helping to recruit students. The school is bringing attention to mining. “I see nationally that the public perception of mining is beginning to turn; it’s a slow ship,” she said. The College of Engineering is growing at UArizona, and Luxbacher felt positive about its future and the school’s growth, with plans to double its recruitment numbers over the next five years. The university also has a strong online presence with post baccalaureate professionals looking for retraining. “We have online programs that are a real strength that we want to leverage to bring new people into the mining industry,” she said. University of Utah efforts Kocsis is one year on the job as department chair at the University of Utah. The work has been “eye opening,” he said, and added that the main issue at the school has been low enrollments. The good news is that after having just five freshman enrolled last year, the mining department now has 18 new students coming in this fall. What happened? Kocsis explained that the old approach was for faculty members to go to the local high schools and try to explain to youth how awesome mining engineering is, and that for the most part, the students were not interested. So instead, the university decided on a new approach in 2022-2023. It organized a workshop and open house in the early spring to which it invited industry experts to be in attendance including those from Rio Tinto and its Kennecott operations near Salt Lake City. The school also invited members of the university’s Industry Advisory Board, local students and parents. “Two to three weeks later we had all this enrollment coming in, and it’s kind of a success story,” he said. Another significant change at the University of Utah is that Kocsis’ department has now merged with the College of Science. In prior roles, he collaborated with biologists, chemists and physicists, and it worked well for him, so he is looking toward this change with an open mind, as well as working with a new dean starting there this summer. Kocsis too felt the tide is turning around the perception of mining, and that people are starting to realize the tremendous need for mined materials for the green energy transition. “I see the same trend of turning the tide in the sense that mining is not that bad,” he said. In his first year on the job, Kocsis has also been focused on connecting the university’s Center for Mining Safety and Health Excellence with industry. He is director of the center, which is focused on advancing health and safety at surface and underground mine sites. “I’ve put a serious focus on listening to industry — what is it that they want and need? What research topics are most relevant,” he said. Kocsis also wants to develop a fall seminar at the university in which mining industry professionals come to the university and discuss their needs with students so that they can understand the opportunities that are available to them in the mining industry, and also to make sure it is the kind of work they want to do. Kocsis said the university’s industry advisory board has been very helpful and includes people from Rio Tinto and Freeport-McMoRan. The school has received ABET accreditation over the last year too. Another important milestone achieved by the University of Utah’s Mining Engineering Department this year is that it is now collaborating with the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational Safety and Health. This is a large center serving Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, and has primarily been focused on the construction and manufacturing sectors. This year, for the first time, mine safety has been added to the center’s work. Virginia Tech Noble said he may be speaking with a “bit of naivety and gleefulness,” while explaining his journey to his new position. It was Luxbacher who suggested he apply for the role and although Noble admits having never thought about working in academic leadership as a career pathway, he found with a lot of deliberation and thought, that “the opportunity for mining in the United States right now is enormous and so amazing,” so he decided to throw his hat into the ring and apply for the job. The vision that comes into Noble’s head when he thinks about opportunities in mining is “like a buffet line with an amazing amount of food on it; more food than you could possibly eat,” he said. “That is what I see from where I’m sitting right now. The incredible opportunity before us in mining is more than any of us can consume,” he said. “It’s going to take all of us locking arms to go and clear out this buffet.” A career fair where students meet with industry professionals and learn about jobs in mining engineering. (Photo courtesy of Missouri S&T.) Noble is quite familiar with Virginia Tech and the department he now heads up as it is the university where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as a Ph.D., and he was a member of the faculty for seven years before moving into the department head role. He said the department has many strengths as well as existing initiatives underway, and he believes his role is to more or less steer the ship for all. “I don’t have to restart the ship, but carefully navigate and leverage the initiatives that have already been started,” he said. On the research side, Noble said Virginia Tech has world-renowned expertise in metals processing technologies, especially for critical minerals, and he hopes to continue to focus on these efforts. He sees the work expanding into battery minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite over the next decade. “If you look at any projection on lithium production, it’s astronomical, and it makes me lose sleep at night for us as a country,” he said. “How are we going to produce all this?” Another area of focus for Noble’s department is the broader area of energy systems and carbon management. The Virginia Center for Cohen Energy Research at Virginia Tech has longstanding expertise in carbon management. Noble sees this as another area of research emphasis as carbon-neutral or carbon-negative mining is a hot topic of interest that he believes will continue to develop over the next decade. Noble believes all of the universities on the call have invested in mine health and safety, and that too will continue to be a focus area of mining engineering programs, and should always be a priority. On the instructional side, Noble’s department carries out a traditional mining engineering program but is increasingly adding leadership skills training, especially around responsible mining, to its course work. The teachers are asking, ‘How do we integrate leadership characteristics and begin training our leaders as undergraduates?’ This is with a mind toward students becoming the next generation of leaders and those who will need to understand what it takes to develop a mine in the 21st century. Noble is passionate about “intentional leadership development,” and seeing that students have this type of training beginning in their freshman year. His vision is that students would then likely have a head start in leadership training prior to being managers in work environments, and much more training than what they would have had otherwise. He believes another common theme of mining engineering departments around the country is digital transformation and data analytics. He is focused on integrating this into the curriculum so that students are “not lost in the wave of new technology and tools.” “More than anything else though … I want us to be a destination for talent, and I like to use that rather than to say recruiting,” Noble said of his vision for Virginia Tech’s mining engineering program. “How can we ensure that the best and the brightest, the smartest, most hardworking, diligent and all-around greatest students are coming to our universities and going to our programs.” Mining engineering students from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) on a mine site visit in Nevada to learn more about the world of mining. (Photo courtesy of UNR.) University of Nevada, Reno Sattarvand had just under a year’s experience as department head at UNR this summer. There are currently multiple lithium operations in the state and many opportunities for growth in mining. He said many mining companies have a long history there, some going back 150 years with gold mining in the state, and they carry weight when it comes to starting up initiatives. UNR did multiple activities with recruiting students over the last several years. The results were that it doubled the number of incoming freshmen numbers, although it is still much lower than the numbers of five years ago. The department had 41 undergraduate students starting in the fall of 2021 in the mining and metallurgical engineering programs, in effect growing the enrollment to 49 undergraduate students. “The department held a monthly open house for high school students highlighting the modern aspects of mining and metallurgical engineering programs, such as automation, AI, virtual reality and robotics. Moreover, faculty members made multiple high school visits to introduce the program to potential scholars. Currently, the department is working with mining companies to support bringing high school students for the open-house events from the rural counties of Nevada,” Sattarvand said. Sattarvand finds it effective to share with youth about these high-tech trends in mining, and he has added this to the curriculum for when high school students visit the university, which occurs monthly throughout the year. “You need to excite kids. I believe that our activities matter, recruitment by faculty, really getting our hands dirty, going to high schools, giving presentations and being active in social media is all really important,” said Sattarvand. He has studied UNR’s data analytics related to recruiting and concluded that there is no single blueprint for students, and that the department should be targeting them and their parents in different ways. Resources of hands-on learning Luxbacher has found there are many people working on problems associated with mining at UArizona. The new school of Mining and Mineral Resources is bringing people together from various engineering disciplines to share facilities and to encourage interdisciplinary work, and she sees that as appealing to students. “One of the things that attracted me to Arizona was the incredible experimental facilities that we have in the San Javier Experimental Mine,” she said. The university has invested nearly $1 million in that facility over the last three years and has owned the mine since the 1950s, so it is a place where students have learned hands on for a long time and alumni remember it fondly too. “We’re working with our local, state and federal lawmakers around continuing to expand that facility to include mineral processing facilities, so that we’re really looking at the whole lifecycle of mining at a fairly large-scale experimental facility, which I think is pretty exciting,” she said. At Virginia Tech, undecided engineering students are also offered the chance to take an exploratory course called “Data and automation in the mining industry,” which uses the new facility and gives students insight into how it works and its uses. “Students can use that facility as they’re exploring their engineering majors and hopefully it gives them kind of a skilled look at what mining may look like while also allowing them to play around with some cool technologies,” said Noble. He believes the new building is a strength, drawing students, faculty and others to it because people want to work and learn in new facilities that are inspiring. Noble will be working and teaching in a completely remodeled setting. Virginia Tech recently renovated the 1890s building where the mining engineering department facility was located to the tune of $70 million. It is a much larger, completely modernized facility with new laboratories and state-of-the-art equipment. It houses a new Center for Autonomous Mining Systems with indoor pits and different partitions that simulate mining work. It also allows for the building and constructing of small-scale mining equipment that can operate with sensors in a simulated mining environment, and students can conduct autonomy experiments. “This is really a push for how we can start integrating. Students can build hands on, deploy robots in a controlled setting and see what happens,” said Noble. The facility isn’t in a high-foot-traffic area, but Noble said it has a big garage door that they open up so when people do walk by, they can see the students operating the equipment, giving more visibility to the hands-on work of mining engineering.

Roundtable with U.S. mining engineering department heads

Authored by:
Nancy Profera

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