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Just a word of caution about the post-graduate medicine route; she'd probably have to do GAMSAT (which is the graduate medical admissions test, rather than UMAT which is the undergraduate one). GAMSAT assumes you have biology and chemistry to a first-year university level, so if she's likely to do it this way she'd be best advised to do something like biomedical science or another course that has those componants. Post graduate medicine tends to be 4 years, as opposed to 6 years for the undergraduate (depends on university).

My experience is that there's such a lack of mining engineers that if you show an interest in that side of things they're more than willing to train you up. I did a shotfiring certificate and the store, handle and transport explosives one as well, then came to the realisation that it's very rare the shottie actually designs the blast.

We have applications from people who have been employed as project geologists by labour supply companies who don't actually have a geology degree - we've had geographers, architects and environmental engineers come from the same mob simply because there's not enough professionals to go around. Frankly if I was the senior geo I'd be getting up the labour supply company.

Certainly the big boys of the industry will put their geos through a mining engineering masters if you ask nicely, I know several people who have gone through the course at Curtin free via their companies.

Has your ultramafic gone through a heap of metasomatism or is the gold syngenetic? I have a large chunk of lherzolite with marble-sized chromite nodules (from the Great Dyke of Zimbabwe) at home. Can't every recall talk of mining ultramafic for gold though, but then again my resources lecturer was very, very dull.

Is it placer deposit? Iron ore never struck me as being particularly interesting; it always seemed to me that you could do the mining with a big vacuum cleaner and not bother with the geo work too much : "if it's red, dig it up and sell it." (I apologise to iron ore geos if you're mortally offended by that and I'm completely wrong). Hanging off the drill rigs in coal is pretty dull but periodically made more interesting by recovering some perfect Glossopteris fossils in the core. Finding geotech much better and would dearly love to move into drill and blast but small children have ended my full time site career now.

Hi Simon. You'll need a HR licence at the very minimum. Here in QLD you can do a Cert 2 in drilling which is designed for newbies and takes you through the whole mining process in a 2 week course (you'll have to google it, I can't remember the name of the provider, they're in Cairns and Brisbane). It's one of the few "mining" training courses that actually hold a bit of chop with the industry and we've put our own offsiders through it.

Once you've got that start targeting the big drilling boys like Lucas, Pheonix, Macdrill and send out CVs, as I've said before, they have a fairly high turnover of offsiders (because it's hard work) and if you've got cert 2 it saves them the expense of putting you through it and risking you quitting and wasting the money.

To join in the geo job convo, it certainly can be an interesting way to see the world. In Bowen Basin coal it's a bit dull though; Quaternary, Tertiary overburden, unconfomity, Permian sandstone/siltstone, black stuff (repeat ad infinitum). I was at one point mining a dormant volcano for gold in PNG, periodic gas explosions used to enliven the truckies' jobs occasionally, and we had a surveyor fall into a blast hole with 80 degree water in it, but is was way cool geology and possibly the only time having done a PhD in volcanism ever came in handy.

Hornster, to try and answer your question on OHS in Mining, in QLD the Workplace H&S Act and Regs do not apply to mine sites; one of the first parts of the Act specificially spells out them as excluded and they fall under their own legislation, so in effct, OHS qualification are largely irrelevent and there's a seperate set of quals for mining work risk management. It's different in each state, and I don't know how the new OHS Act is going to work as I believe each other state's mines follow OHS legislation and it doesn't have that exclusion in it.

But yes, the Coal Mining Act is very specific in stating that the site senior executive (and effectively the deputies in forms of the saftey managers) are *personally* held responasible for accidents and incidents - which is why there is a monumental amount of paperwork to be done before someone's allowed on a site. If there's a serious accident, someone in management will go to jail for it. I recall a trainer saying the main difference between the Workplace and Coal Mining Safety and Health Acts were that under OHS law your company will be sued, under Coal Mining it's the individual.

During training they like to bring up examples of managers who served time for mining fatalities, luckily never been in the position of finding out how stringent it is in reality.

Really good post, but it goes to show how different each state is; in QLD the easiest way in is through the drilling contractors as they have a massive turnover of offsiders. The qualifications you have to get are completely different (covered this on another thread so not going to repeat myself), and unless the companies are actually advertising there's no point trying to contact them as screening agencies actually do the first stage of recruiting and the mining houses don't actually see candidates until they've been whittled down.

Mines love OHS, even though they don't come under the same legislation as other (say) construction worksites, proving that you know something about it is a big bonus in their mind. Plus having training and assessment, they like that too.

Finally, the biggest difference between WA and QLD is that we don't want a HR licence - none of the boneheads I know has one, generally as they try and fill minority quotas the best way in is to be female and aboriginal (not a lot of help to most, but believe me, it makes a difference).

So aim for the state you want, and research what quals you need for that state. They're trying to make competancies and inductions universal, but at the moment they're not and if you have a WA MARCSTA it's irrelevent in QLD and you'll have to get your generic passport and SGS anyway.

If anyone wants to know about QLD (specifically Bowen Basin) mines drop me a PM. I've worked on most of them.