U of Waterloo team emerges victorious at National Mining Competition

The 2014 National Mining Competition's winning team of engineering undergraduates from the University of Waterloo, from left: Andrew Jiang, Marco Chan, Seung-Youn Lee and Vincent Zhu (not pictured). — Photo courtesy National Mining Competition—David Stobbe/Stobbephoto.ca

A team from the University of Waterloo recently attended the third annual National Mining Competition hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. After a grueling couple of days, with multiple challenges and presentations, the team emerged victorious at the top. The competition began on October 30th and final presentations were held on November 2nd. A total of 16 teams from across Canada, as well as other countries including India, England, and Germany attended. Many industry experts were also present to help guide delegates and judge the presentations. These experts were comprised of engineers, consultants, managers, government officials and accountants.

The competition revolved around a fictional mining company for which each team is a consultant. The goal was to create a strategy for the development of the assets that the company owned. The first challenge placed teams in a room full of experts. The teams were given a short period of time to ask each expert questions before moving on to the next. The second challenge involved public relations – one member of each team took on the role of CEO for a mining company whose mine is in close proximity to a wild fire. Finally, the main presentation was held at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edward’s School of Business. Here teams were split into four different groups and presented to a panel of judges. The top presentation in each group went on to the finals, along with one wild card decided by all of the judges. The final presentations were conducted in a large hall, with the judges being senior executives from various mining companies.

Vincent Zhu, one of the team members, spoke about the team’s efforts: “Our team’s submission was far from perfect. Being a team of engineers, it was difficult to grasp the financials behind the case. It was very fortunate for us that we had all taken engineering economics the term before, which helped us with our economic analysis. While we were not a multi-disciplinary team, we approached the challenge from all angles. We ensured that our presentation had not only the financials (and numbers to back those financials) but also took into consideration socio-economic impacts of each action and how to mitigate them, as well as recommending new technologies that could be implemented into the company’s operations.”

“Coming into the competition, we were definitely not experts in mining technology or business. We placed first in the Waterloo Engineering Consulting competition last term and that’s what earned us the spot to represent Waterloo. Luckily for us, the first challenge gave us the opportunity to talk to some experts and get some insight on how to work on our case. Insights such as, ‘if you’re going to close a mine get ready for some community backlash, because a lot of people will be losing their jobs.’ A large part of the competition was finance, and we spent a good part of the weekend just coming up with some numbers to back our presentation (unbelievable that the national mining competition is so finance heavy- it’s just WACC). As for the actual presentation, we were taken aback when we made the finals. While delivering our final presentation, it felt as if we were completely grilled by the judges. Nevertheless, we were elated to hear that we had won, especially considering that we thought of ourselves as being underdogs in this competition.”

This is the first time that UW has sent a team to participate in this competition, so it is quite an achievement for the team to have emerged victorious. It is hoped that the trend of winning continues in future years.