 Hello everyone. In this video, I'll be going over the classes you take as a third and fourth year student in Mining Engineering. If you want to learn more about what classes you take in first and second year, then check out my previous video where I'll talk about just that. Third and fourth year is the better half of your degree, since that's where the interesting classes come in, and you can customize your degree to learn more about what you like. Year three, this is the year when over half of your courses are Mining courses, and it's when you really feel like you're in Mining. However, there are some more foundational courses you need to take, and they are Engineering Materials and Basic Circuit Analysis. In the Engineering Materials course, you'll learn about different properties of materials and what applications they're suitable for. I personally found the Engineering Materials course to be really interesting, but it's probably not relevant in your career unless you're doing R&D. And the Basic Circuit Analysis class is your first year circuits class, but goes even more in depth. Two of the most important classes in your degree will be your third year classes in Surface and Underground Mined Design. For the Surface Design class, you'll go into Mining Methods, Calculation of Pit Limits, Breakeven Criteria, Strip Ratios, Pit Sequencing, and a lot more interesting things. For the Underground version, you'll look at the different Mining Methods and Selection Principles, including the Geological, Environmental, and Economic Constraints. In the Brock fragmentation class, you'll learn about Drill and Blast, and how to appropriately design a Blast pattern for both Open Pit and Underground Mines, including the Types of Blast, Types of Explosives, and the Environmental and Safety Implications of Blasting. There's a lot more to just putting explosives in the ground and blowing it up, and learning how it all works was really eye-opening for me. In the Brock Mechanics Fundamentals class, you'll learn about Brock Properties and how to apply Geotechnical Principles towards Mined Designs for Open Pit and Underground Mines. While I didn't find this course particularly interesting, a lot of these concepts will be needed for the advanced version of this class, which I found to be more practical. For the Processing side, one of the courses you'll take is Physical Mineral Processes, which deals with things like crushing, grinding, screening, classification, separation methods, and dewatering practices. A lot of this is understanding how to select the right equipment for your ore so you can efficiently extract your minerals while minimizing costs. The other Processing course in your third year will be Flotation, which is the most common separation method used in the mining industry. And while there is some chemistry involved, it wasn't too extensive. But if the chemistry side of mining is your thing, then you'll like this course. Another course you'll need to take is the Modeling and Simulation class. Here, you'll mainly look at methods of estimating ore grades using drill hole data and simulating Q-times for a mining operation to understand how to optimize a production fleet. There's some statistics involved from your second year class, but it wasn't too difficult. And it's an interesting class to take, especially if you're into optimization problems. Lastly, you'll need to take an Engineering Economics course for mining. Here, you'll learn about basic financial courses, as well as revenue and cost estimation methods for mining operations. You'll also learn about valuation methods, effects of taxation for mining exploration and development, and all of this ties into the subject of investment decision. I find this course to be really interesting, since you get to learn about how a mining operation is financed. In third year, you'll also need to take some technical electives, which I'll share at the end of the video, since it applies to fourth year as well. And fourth year is the best year, hands down. The courses are the easiest here, and you'll get to learn about the peripheries of mining engineering, which helps you to understand the environmental, social, and safety implications of your technical decisions as a mining engineer. For example, you'll need to take a course on engineering essays. I actually found this course to be surprisingly interesting. Since as an engineer, you'll need to fully understand the liabilities you take on as part of your responsibilities, and along with their actions. Next up, you have your ventilation course, where you learn about how to design a ventilation system for underground lines, so you can bring the right amount of clean, cool air to the mine while minimizing costs. You also use a program called Vensim to run simulations of your ventilation design. In the mine management course, you learn about the management decisions that affect some mining operation. While there's no specific skill you leave with after completing this class, you'll have a greater appreciation for the human dynamics of a mining operation that you may face once you go into the working world. And in the mineral processing control course, you'll get to learn about the cutting edge technology used in the mining and mineral processing operations. Think about automation, sensors, and stability analysis. There's a lot for this class too, where you get to design prototypes to solve real-world solutions. So for example, some people in my class developed a sensor for haul trucks to detect and analyze road conditions. Another group developed an augmented reality program for doing pit wall inspections without having to go into the field, thereby avoiding a potential safety hazard. In the materials handling class, you learn about the types of equipment used in mining operation. Overall, it's a pretty simple course, but there is a little bit of physics involved. For mine waste management, you learn about how to design a tailing storage facility, or also known as TSF, based on geotechnical, hydrological, and spatial principles. Tailings is pretty much an inevitable part of mining, and it's a great knowledge to have wherever you go. Different mines produce different types of tailings, so it's important to understand the principles of TSF so you can use the right design and avoid catastrophic failures. The mining and environment course is closely tied to the mine waste management course, wherein the mine waste management course dives into the more technical aspects, the mining and environment course dives more into the social aspects. In the environment course, you learn about things such as mining facts and perception, sustainable development, acid rock drainage, artisanal mining, and enclosure design. One of the topics that was really eye-opening for me was the artisanal mining section, since it was a huge environmental, social, and political problem that exists in the world that I barely knew anything about prior to this course. And last but not least, you have your capstone project. For some schools such as Queens, you need to do both a capstone and a thesis. Some other schools require you to do one or the other. At UBC, where I went, and at least the time that I went, I only had to do a capstone. And the capstone is where you get to put together everything you learn into a project of your choosing. The traditional capstone for a mining student is a feasibility study for a mine, which would include designing a mine, creating a production schedule, choosing the equipment, fleet, and size, designing a processing plant flow sheet, and evaluating the financials of the project to make an investment decision. However, you're only limited to your imagination in terms of what you can choose for your project. For example, you can look at the feasibility of deep-sea mining or applications of artificial intelligence mining. You can also go really technical and look at mathematical optimization of resource-constrained project scheduling. For me, I and a lot of my teammates investigated the viability of seasonal waste, heat storage, and rock piles for remote communities in cold climate areas. And last but not least, there's a whole bunch of technical electives that you can choose from to round out your degree. I won't go over all of them, but I'll list a few of them so you know what the options are. So that's it for this series. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away in the comment section below, or you can ask me on Instagram, where I'll be putting more mining