Mining engineering's blast day

Today is Blast Day. "We'll be blasting in approximately 15 seconds." We offer this to our students a few times a semester. We're at Rockydale Quarries' Roanoke quarry. Virginia Tech had the prospective mining engineering students come out and take a look at what we do. And one of the more, I guess, fun things that we do is blowing things up. "Fire in the hole." Mining engineering is a really unique blend between mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and geology. Most students come to the university having never heard of mining engineering before, and so we do a lot of work to educate our general engineering students about what our major is and how they can get involved. I'm a freshman, so I'm technically in a general engineering major, but I'm going to switch over to mining. I knew I wanted to do engineering. I didn't know what major specifically. Once I got here, and I started learning more about the different majors, and I started actually looking into mining. I had never heard of it before, but they've had so many like career fairs and like presentations for the different majors and kind of solidified me into this path, and I'm glad. Out of all engineering disciplines in the United States, there's only 14 programs that are producing mining engineers. One thing that we really pride ourselves on in our department is our 100% job placement for students. Our industry partners are really excited to be meeting prospective students that can grow the industry and keep the industry producing the things that we need for modern society. "So you can see up there the original bench levels that they had, those little shelves up there..." To go out and reach out to Virginia Tech and create this relationship with them is beneficial for them as far as being able to get their students to see a blast, see what we do, and see what mining is all about. Then for us, it's just exposure, right? We're in the back yard of Virginia Tech, and it's a great place for us to find some good talent.