Melissa Nowicki always thought she'd be a teacher when she grew up. But in her last year of high school, she took a fateful field trip to the faculty of science at the University of Waterloo.

"They had a number of speakers there talking about the different sciences. I learned about earth science and hydrogeology, and I thought that was some of the coolest stuff in the world," she says.

"I went into geological engineering, but was lured into the mining world along the way. I just really enjoyed it. It was the first thing I ever got gung ho about."

Shortly after completing her mining engineering degree at the University of Toronto in 2002, Nowicki, 25, was offered a four-year internship as a mine production engineer at the Goldcorp Inc. mine near Red Lake, Ontario. She needs four years of experience before becoming a licensed professional engineer.

Although Red Lake is about a 22-hour drive northwest of her hometown of Toronto, she's come to love working there.

"The people here are really nice. It's a really young workforce, and there are lots of people to go fishing with on the weekends. It's a great place to be working...I'm also getting a chance to get my feet wet in a lot of different areas," she says.

Ground control
Over the past three years, Nowicki has mostly worked in ground control, making sure the rocks are secure and won't fall on miners, and in short-range planning, making Auto-Cad drawings of blast and excavation sites.

The internship keeps her moving around the engineering department so that she learns all the specialties. Goldcorp usually hires interns as permanent staff, says Nowicki.

She says her family has been extremely supportive of her career, visiting her frequently to make sure she's not homesick. Her retired coal-miner grandfather, however, had a few initial concerns.

"My grandfather freaked a little bit when he finally realized I was going to be working in a mine. I had always worked in summer jobs on surface. He said, 'my only granddaughter is going to work in a mine,'" laughs Nowicki.

"He had worked in a coal mine in Belgium after the Second World War. Things have changed a lot since then, and coal mining is very different from hard rock."

Although mining still tends to be male-dominated, Nowicki says she's had very few problems fitting in.

Male-dominated
"It takes a certain personality I think. I'm one of the few women who go underground... but it's great because everybody treats me like their little sister or their niece or granddaughter. They really take you under their wing."

Nowicki says high school students looking into mining engineering should make sure they take Chemistry, Physics, Algebra and English courses. An analytical mind and the ability to work with others are extremely important, she says.

"Teamwork is very important here. You constantly end up working with a bunch of different people. It's nice being young and new at the mine, because there are a lot of people to learn from."

The money isn't bad either. Engineering interns tend to earn about $50,000 to start, and that number skyrockets when they get more experience.

Nowicki says she and her classmates had no problems getting jobs upon graduation, but she warns it might not always be so easy.

"I got hired quickly because the industry had started to boom. Everybody from my class who didn't go on to do more studies had work within a year, and most of them are working within Canada," she says.

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