General News & Comment McGill, Polytech plan co-op course in

McGill University, Montreal and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, said to be Canada’s two oldest mining schools, are jointly developing a new bachelor’s degree program in mining engineering.

In an announcement, Dr Pierre Belanger, dean of engineering at McGill, and Dr Roland Dore, director of the Ecole Polytechnique, say the degree is to be associated with a co-op program, common to both institutions, and strongly linked with the mining industry.

It will be a bilingual program, and students registering will phase their studies between the two schools, each of which will provide complementary teaching.

The program will include three stages of structured industrial training.

The general aim of the new program, it’s contended, is to develop a mining engineering graduate “appropriately equipped to confront the future technological challenges to be faced by the industry in its efforts to increase its competitiveness with foreign producers.”

Stressed is the fact that the co-op scheme will allow the students to participate in applied mining projects in the industry itself. Close industry collaboration, the two schools say, will allow students to complement their academic studies with an integrated work experience totalling 13 months.

The new degree program is seen as affording an opportunity to integrate more aspects of mechanization, automation, and computer applications into the undergraduate degree scheme, and would be an “important development” in parallel to the continuing evolution of the proposed Canadian Centre for Mining Automation and Robotics.

This centre will also be founded on McGill and Ecole Polytechnique, with the support of the Canadian mining industry.

There are four other universities in Canada currently with degree- granting courses in mining engineering. They are the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont., and Technical University of Nova Scotia.