More scholarships to meet industry need for engineers

The Canadian Mineral Industry Education Foundation is widening its horizons.

For more than 20 largely-unheralded years, the industry-supported, non-profit foundation has been quietly but effectively working to advance the study of mining in Canada. More specifically, its mandate is to attract and encourage more top-flight young people to choose engineering careers in Canada’s mineral industry.

Some 35 companies, including most of the major base metals and gold-producing companies in Canada, are contributing members of the foundation. (In addition, it regularly receives a large annual donation from the J. P. Bickell Foundation.)

The CMIEF was organized back in 1965, as the result of an initiative by a group of mining executives led by John Bradfield, then chairman of Noranda Mines. Concerned with the quality and quantity of young men entering the mineral industry at Canadian universities, the organization initially undertook to finance a postgraduate mining engineering scholarship program at McGill University in Montreal.

This was later widened into a nationwide mining engineering scholarship program and extended to all degree-granting mining schools in Canada. It granted scholarships at the undergraduate as well as the postgraduate level.

On the undergraduate side, foundation scholarships of $2,000 per year are now awarded to undergraduate students for up to three years, toward a bachelor’s degree in mining or mineral engineering and extractive or process metallurgical engineering.

And, says foundation vice-chairman Klaus Konigsmann (vice- president, milling, at member company Noranda Inc.), in the 22 years since its inception, about 350 bachelors, masters and PhDs in mineral engineering disciplines have been supported by the institution.

In fact, the current chairman of the 12-member volunteer board at the foundation, Thomas Pugsley (director of mining engineering and research at Falconbridge Ltd.), was one of the first recipients of a foundation scholarship, as was John Carrington, now vice-president operations, at Minnova Inc.

About two years ago, in response to a trend toward more specialization in technical requirements in the mineral industry (a trend which has made finding engineers with specific technical background in some areas more difficult), the foundation set up a postgraduate program which awards up to three mining or metallurgical engineers $5,000 scholarships for research in rock mechanics, computerization of mining and metallurgical operations, or robotics and automation.

Finally, a program was established to include scholarships for mechanical/electrical engineering undergraduates in their final year of study. But in this program, applications for scholarships would only be considered upon recommendation by a member company which had previously employed the undergraduate as a summer student.

Now, however, that program has been opened up to admit students in the mechanical/electrical/process control disciplines — students who will not need that kind of recommendation for scholarship consideration.

“There is a shortage of people in these disciplines who can work or want to work, in the mining industry,” Konigsmann tells The Northern Miner, and the foundation wants to open the door for them. Building a continuing supply of young engineers is one of the major challenges for today’s mining industry, he said, and that supply must include mechanical and electrical engineers as well as the base load of mining and metallurgical graduates. However, the latter will still be the first to get scholarship consideration by the foundation, he emphasized.

This year, the Canadian Mineral Industry Education Foundation has a scholarship budget of more than $81,000. Its work is helping to ensure that well-qualified engineering graduates will be available to the mining industry for its expanding requirements.