Prairie State Generating Company is excited to welcome Alex Dietrich as a mining intern for the summer of 2017.
Dietrich, who is from Marissa, is a junior at Missouri S&T with his fellow intern Meena Lahiri. Dietrich’s experience at PSGC has been a little different from the other four mining interns. He has spent the majority of his time on the surface working with the mine’s maintenance staff.
“One of the things led me into working with the maintenance staff was my fascination with big equipment,” he said. “Working with the maintenance department I get to do a lot with all of the different equipment and all of the different parts that go with maintaining them and even running them.”
His experience on the surface of the mine is giving him a perspective of the operation that a typical miner or intern may not get. He’s learning a lot about the proper care of the equipment and how that can affect the overall productivity of the mine.
His summer project involves analyzing data taken from the continuous miners to find out how much time the machine spends cutting and comparing it to the time that it spends down, out of commission or moving from place to place within the mine. With that data, PSGC will be able to look for trends in cutting time and down time, with the future potential to reduce maintenance and repair costs.
Dietrich is pleased to be enjoying his internship at Prairie State so much, especially because he didn’t quite know what to expect coming into it. This is his first taste of working in a mine in a professional aspect.
Following the completion of his internship at Prairie State, Deitrich will return to Missouri S&T for the final two years of his collegiate career. After graduation, he hopes to find a job working in the coal mining industry.