Day-to-day tasks are very interesting and varied. You definitely get to work on real, impactful projects in the grad program. Tasks include: data visualisation, data analysis, machine learning model development, requirements gathering, documentation, and data engineering.
Managing drill rigs, logging, modelling,
After arriving at work at 5:30 am, I log onto my laptop and check the production results and trends over the past 24-hours, identifying any issues that occurred and attempting to diagnose these. At 6 am, I meet with the process operators for shift handover, where I ask questions and find out about how the plant area I am in charge of performed, and relay any information not on production reports and shift logs. After this, I walk the area I'm in charge of to see if there are any visible issues or safety concerns with it, fixing any easy issues. At 7 am, the plant metallurgy team meets for a morning production meeting, where all the area metallurgists share how their area performed over the previous day and bring up any issues. At 7:30 am, we have a safety pre-start meeting where we look at the safety performance over the previous day, look at site communications and safety bulletins, celebrate successes, and identify hazards for the shift tasks ahead. Following this, the rest of the day is free to complete other tasks. Every day is different but might consist of any of the following: - Daily tasks - working with operators to resolve issues in the plant, performing analysis on production or laboratory data, etc. - Projects - designing sampling regimes, commissioning new equipment, analysing laboratory data, etc. - Meetings - with other teams to share updates on our work, and suppliers or vendors regarding their product performance - Metallurgical accounting - where we reconcile data to ensure the tonnes and grade of the material we produce is correct based on laboratory data Every day is very different regarding the nature of work, which makes this job very interesting. Most of the jobs I get are very meaningful but there is the occasional mundane task that must be completed.
When tasks come through, I genuinely enjoy them and find the work engaging. Depending on what's happening or what's coming up, I sometimes need to ask for additional work to stay productive throughout the day. I really appreciate the variety in my role and the opportunity to work across different areas—including community investment, stakeholder engagement and community relations, communications (both internal and external), and reporting. This diversity keeps things interesting and helps me build a broad skill set.
