Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree
Water and Coastal Management
WACOMA
I have completed my 3 months internship in the company Tharsis Mining & Metallurgy, located in Huelva, Spain.
I was looking for internship opportunities in the mining industry because I already had work experience in the sector when Professor María Dolores Basallote Sanchez, from the University of Huelva, encouraged me to perform it with Tharsis Mining & Metallurgy. The work carried out during the internship was key for developing my master thesis called “Unmanned Aerial Multispectral Imagery for monitoring acid mine water in the Iberian Pyrite Belt (Tharsis, Spain)“ since I was able to gather the data needed to develop it.
Tharsis Mining & Metallurgy is a Spanish company dedicated to the metal mining sector in the Iberian Pyrite Belt, where it has mining rights with more than 4,500 hectares granted by the municipalities of Tharsis, Alosno, La Zarza and San Telmo. The water quality monitoring is part of the company agenda and I worked in the monitoring of pit lakes, seepage waters, and dams located in the Tharsis mine complex.
The fieldwork involved field campaigns to perform water sampling, through in-situ measurements, laboratory analysis, and drone imagery acquisition. While most of the work implied cabinetwork such as data management, image processing, statistical analysis, and interpretation.
During my internship experience with Tharsis Mining & Metallurgy, I was able to develop my analytical and critical thinking and conflict resolution skills. I particularly found the data processing step to be useful in improving my technical knowledge since I used a variety of processing software such as Pix4D, R, QGIS, SAGA, SPSS, SNAP. The fieldwork was also a great opportunity to see the challenges of the water monitoring campaigns and the amount of work involved in flying drones which couldn’t be possible without the support of the University of Huelva and the Drones Laboratory from the University of Cadiz.
Thank you TharsisMining & Metallurgy, Dr. María Dolores BasalloteSanchez, and WACOMA for the opportunity!
I have successfully completed my internship from 7th September to 27th November 2020 with a total of 395.5 hours as required module worth 8 ECTS in the final semester of WACOMA.
Among some of the services provided by Lighthouse include geophysical, geotechnical and environmental surveys, construction and positioning supports, subsea services and data processing and interpretation.
I spent most my time at the Department of Data Processing and Interpretation under the supervision of Stefano Sandroni, who is the Data Interpretation and Final Reports Production Manager.
Soft skills such as report writing using MS Word, data organization, naming convention, best practices and cautions while handling a large amount of data, quality control and assurance are some of the examples that I have gained from this experience.
Transferrable skills are namely analytical ability, logical thinking, research problem solving and time management are amongst the outcomes that I have managed to practice and experience over the time spent during the internship.
Last update: 28 Jul 2021