Major: Mining Engineering
Minor: GIS, Environmental Health and Safety
Hometown: State College, PA
Advisor: Barbara Arnold
Expected Graduation: 2027
Connor Casewell, a junior mining engineering major, spent this summer with Robindale Energy Services, traveling between job sites to conduct water and soil sampling and learn the ropes in data management and record keeping. For his first internship experience, Caswell appreciated the opportunity to learn from those in the field while serving as a second set of hands.
What made you choose your major or area of study?
Growing up in State College, PA, I traveled across Pennsylvania for competitive swimming a lot, and I would see the byproducts of mining, things like orange water and acid mine drainage, and I wanted to be a part of the cleanup and reverse some of the damage. I wanted my career to have meaning, and helping fix the environment made the most sense.
What is your dream job?
My dream is to work in environmental remediation in any form, maybe moving out of Pennsylvania to either the Appalachian region or out west — I really want to see more out there.
EME is helping me achieve that, not just by expanding my knowledge, but also by supporting me and providing opportunities to meet other mining engineers with student groups like the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) and the International Society of Explosives Engineers (ISEE).
My Internship
What does a typical day look like?
I do anything that I'm told to do. I regularly visit Robindale's fifteen to twenty sites to collect samples and send them for analysis. That requires creating different tests based on the site's properties or whichever test we’re running. I assist with everything from preparation to collecting samples from mine discharge ponds in a clear collection bottle to managing the data in Excel.
There is a lot of time between sampling and driving to sites, which gives me a chance to hear about all the nuances of filing and processing tests from the engineers and foremen I’m shadowing. I've even done some manual labor at a couple of sites, like haying.
The biggest part of my internship is actually interacting with various government agencies and municipalities. In the classroom, you're not making those phone calls, talking with the inspectors, or dealing with the bureaucracy, but I’m getting a firsthand experience doing a lot of that.
What is your favorite part?
My favorite part is seeing the scale of the remediation projects in person, how much material is involved, and really seeing the positive environmental impact of cleaning up old coal refuse piles. I really like seeing that the numbers have gone down in the documentation and that the treatments are actually working.
When you get down to it, a lot of mining is moving stuff, and it's cool to see what we learned in class being applied, like with slope and mine design, in person at the scale of the job sites. I also really like getting to see all the different parts of Pennsylvania.
Fun Fact: My sibling and I share the same birthday, but three years apart.