What's your job about?
I currently work at Roy Hill – as an iron operator, in the Metallurgy department (as part of Technical Services) as a graduate process engineer. Since the start of my employment, I have been rotated to different areas of metallurgy including
I am currently a part of the Metallurgy Development team where I get involved in the LGO project. The project focuses on beneficiating the low-grade materials and benchmarking against different separation technologies to determine the most efficient and profitable option through network performance. My responsibilities include:
Besides my main project, I also got exposed to tasks from various projects within the Metallurgy Development team to further understand different ore characteristics and how each ore body is being processed and aligned with the existing RH processing plant, as well as options for flowsheet development.
What's your background?
I started university in 2016! During my time at Curtin, I was very active in clubs participation. I used to be a Member Engagement Coordinator of Curtin Engineers Without Borders (EWB) where I got to meet amazing people from different engineering backgrounds who are very passionate about humanitarian engineering.
Besides, I completed a few vacation work programs across multiple industries where I was exposed to different working environments and gained valuable problem-solving and communication skills, which help a lot in my current job so would highly recommend it!
I applied to the Roy Hill graduate program through Seek and have been working here since April 2021.
Cannot believe it is almost a year since I joined Roy Hill. Comparing myself to about a year ago, I can see significant development and growth in my career journey as a process engineer. I am much more confident with my analytical skills and judgements.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
No.
I believe to draw conclusions and provide relevant recommendations; you would need to have a fundamental understanding of the ore characteristics and their significant impacts on the beneficiation processes based on the unique ore features. You are also required to have a good understanding of the test work programs and good data analysis skills. Python programming is a bonus skill to conduct regression models.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
What I love about my job is being able to provide technical metallurgical inputs as part of a broader project. I got a chance to communicate and share my knowledge among (external and internal) people with different technical backgrounds and also learn from them!
Sometimes when the tasks became stressful or overwhelming, I would take a 10-minute break and learn about some other aspects of metallurgy (there are so many metallurgical reports and papers from previous projects on the Roy Hill DMS system that you can expand your knowledge on!)
What are the limitations of your job?
It really depends on where you want to be as a graduate process engineer:
If you are more into daily troubleshooting and want to work on-site, it can be physically challenging due to the long hours and hot weather.
But if you are into engineering design, feasibility study and growth development, you will need to have good knowledge not only in metallurgy/process engineering area but also in drilling, geology, and mechanical engineering areas as well.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...