What's your job about?
I work in the Electrical Process Maintenance department of Newmont’s Boddington gold mine. My responsibilities include communicating our power consumption with our electricity supplier, electrical assessments for small upcoming projects and generating procedures and testing critical protection relays. One of my projects is to provide the electrical assessment for replacing a 1.5MVA 11/0.415kV transformer with a 2MVA 33/0.415KV transformer. This includes assessing how the equipment connected the incoming power line must change to facilitate the larger transformer.
A typical day working on this project includes identifying what equipment and protection settings are currently in operation. Inspecting the existing equipment on site. Using Australian Standards to calculate the necessary protection settings and equipment size type and manufacture. I work closely with my senior engineer to develop the skills and knowledge for all my tasks and am given time to independently work on projects.
What's your background?
I’ve lived in Perth for my entire life. Before working for Newmont I only had retail experience until my 4th year at UWA. I studied Engineering Science and Management at UWA before staring my Masters of Electrical and Electronic Engineering there in 2020. In the summer of my penultimate year I worked at Newmont’s Boddington Gold Mine. The vacation program is heavily focused on upskilling students and providing them experience from as many relevant departments you can attend before you go back to university. I worked with the electrical (engineering) process maintenance team, D6 Dam electrical engineering project team and spend a month with the low voltage electricians.
Working with the electricians is the fastest way to understand how a site operates and all the protective equipment and I highly recommend it. This is something I expect most graduate vacation programs might miss, however I found it so useful I went back to the high voltage electrical department to work with electricians for a month as a graduate.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Someone without a Masters in Electrical Engineering that specialised in Power Electronics could not legally do this job. This is defined in 1991 electrician licencing regulations and without this background there would be very significant limitations to the work you could approve or be involved with.
This means UWA students who have an Electrical and Electronic Degree must have primarily focused their core/optional units on power electronics. Curtin students I’m told have a more formal choice of selecting power electronics to specialise in.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The best part of my job are easily the people but that probably sounds too generic to so I’ll talk about my tasks. The Boddington mine site is dates back beyond 1989, causing frequency redesigns. This causes around 70-80% of my workload to be designing electrical systems even though I work in the process maintenance department which is awesome for building experience and preventing repetitive tasks.
When I introduce myself on site and mention I’m a graduate people open up and people take the time to explain to me what they’re working on, why it’s significant and how their day’s going.
What are the limitations of your job?
As an electrical process maintenance engineer you must work on-site for your scheduled 5/2, 4/3 (Boddington) or 8/6 (Tanami) roster. While I work from home on unusual occasions I wouldn’t spend more than 2-4 weeks a year working from home as I would miss out engaging with other teams and the equipment.
You need a drivers licence, must be able to work for 8 days straight during shutdowns that occur twice a year. You’ll spend 4-5 days a week without seeing your Perth friends or family in person however you have 5 hours off on weeknights while in Boddington where you can unwind and call friends and family.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...
I would tell my younger self to: