By Curtis Gordon
The LU Bharti School of Engineering Team placed second in the 31st annual Canadian Mining Games.
The Laurentian team finished with 966 points just four points behind Laval University, which won the competition with 970 points. Third place went to the University of Alberta.
The competition was held virtually and was hosted by McGill University and Polytechnique Montreal.
Students competed as individuals or as a team in a range of disciplines through technical and academic challenges. Universities were ranked based on the sum of team members’ scores.
Events ranged from ‘Mineral Processing’ to ‘Health and Safety’ to ‘Mine Trivia.’ In total, the weekend featured over 25 events and presentations.
Jackson Miteff, a second-year mining engineering student, was the youngest member of the team.
“It was very well-done for being online,” Miteff said. “It’s obviously better in person, but I had a lot of fun.”
Miteff competed in three events including Scheduling for Value, Mine Trivia, and Sustainable Development.
Miteff finished in fourth place in the Scheduling for Value event and won Sustainable Development alongside teammate Michael Chevalier.
On top of finishing second overall, Laurentian won the most prestigious event of the Games, the Underground Mine Design.
Laurentian also won the newly created Data Analytics event, presented by Newtrax, and had their video submission featured on the company’s LinkedIn page.
The team was led by captains Tommy Adair, Jessica Bronicheski, Milton Chateauvert, and Scott Villeneuve.
In a joint statement, the captains said, “We are extremely proud of our podium finish this year, and we are the first team to have a podium finish since LU placed second at the 2012 games.”
“Our main achievement this year is the 1st place finish in the mine design event, which is by far the heaviest weighted challenge of the games, and it involves 4 team members creating a full underground mine design plan and report given an ore body only with 8 hours.”
The captains said that winning the event confirmed their podium finish, as well as assisted them in a tiebreaker over the Alberta team.
“We will definitely be looking to get that first-place finish next year!”
The captains acknowledged the challenges of having the competition held virtually, and said that “Organizing the team into their respective events proved fairly challenging,” they said.
“Since the events all had to be held remotely, and with students unable to be together at all, there were several new events added and a few events had to be removed.”
Because they had little background information on the new events, the captains had to select team members for the events by taking “previous industry experience and level of studies completed” into consideration.
The captains said they did their best “to keep the spirit of the games alive” by keeping the team engaged and providing merchandise.
“Participating in the after-hours events was key to making sure that the event was still fun and hopefully the rest of the team feels the same way and will be even more excited to experience Mining Games in person next year.”
The full list of students who made up the LU team includes: Tommy Adair, Xavier Beneteau, Cat Biskupski, Jessica Bronicheski, Milton Chateauvert, Jay Chenier, Michael Chevalier, Sarah Cholewinsky, Tylor Gmehlin, Johnathan Hutteri, Bryce Jones George, Jonathan Leroux, Jack Miteff, Reid Murray, Scott Villeneuve, and Connor White.