Chemical engineering students win national mining contest

Monday, November 10, 2014

A team of second year chemical engineering students brought home top prize in this year's National Mining Competition hosted by the University of Saskatchewan from October 30 to November 2.

Waterloo Engineering's team of  Marco Chan, Seung-Youn 

Mining challenge winners
Lee (shown right), Andrew Jiang and Vincent Zhu competed against 15 others from schools in Canada, the United States, England, Germany and India.

The competition revolved around a fictional mining company for which each team consulted. The goal was to create a strategy for the development of assets owned by the company.

Zhu says the multi-disciplinary challenge focused on the technical, financial as well as socio-economic issues around the mining industry.

"We were definitely not experts in mining technology or business before entering the competition," Zhu says. "We certainly aren't now after this one competition, however we came out of it understanding more about the industry."