The Experiences that Make Montana Tech Unique

By Sherman Cahill

At Montana Tech, learning isn’t just an abstraction, and it isn’t something done exclusively behind classroom doors, while seated in desks. Instead, learning is hands-on, and principles learned behind the desk are applied in the lab. At Montana Tech, learning often means getting your hands dirty.

Nothing demonstrates that ethos better than the Orphan Boy. This mine was founded by Copper King William Clark and gifted, along with its sister the Orphan Girl (now part of the World Mining Museum), to Montana Tech in 2010. In 2012 it was opened up as a living laboratory for students to put what they’ve learned to use.

I asked Scott Rosenthal, Chair of the Mining Engineering Department and instructor of the Practical Underground Mining class, how far you’d have to go to get a similar experience. “Well, Montana Tech has the only on-campus underground laboratory and teaching center in the U.S.”

“I believe Freiberg in Germany has an under-campus lab,” he added.

The Orphan Boy now functions as a lab to support coursework, as well as a research facility. Professor Rosenthal elaborated on just a few of its uses: “The Geological Engineering department uses the facility for mapping structure and weathering of the rock; Safety Health and Industrial Hygiene (OSH) have had mine safety classes visit the underground mine, and performed joint research with Mining Engineering in noise monitoring, dust monitoring, and hand-arm vibration assessment; Metallurgical and Materials Engineering have collected mineralized material for a mineral processing lab; and Mining Engineering uses the facility for ventilation and geomechanics labs as well as research in the area of controlled blasting, near-field blasting vibration assessment, and explosives performance.”

The Orphan Boy has additional uses, too, as the only existing mine in town that still displays the veins of ore and minerals for which Butte is justifiably world famous. Students from all around the world, including West Virginia University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and the University of Montreal, have come to observe practical mining in action. Then there’s research: in 2010, following a feasibility study, the Department of Energy awarded Montana Tech a grant to install heat exchangers in the Natural Resources Building as well as in the 300 gallons of warm water contained in the shaft. The water in the mine now provides some of the heat for the campus building.

The presence of the Orphan Boy is a tremendous boon to Montana Tech, and to Butte, Montana. Other schools have to be content to learn about mining from books and whiteboards, but in Butte, they can do it from the privileged vantage of hundreds of feet underground.

This may be a bit of cultural bias and hometown pride speaking here, but I seriously doubt that you’d get a better practical education in hard-rock mining if you learned to speak Deutsch and shipped off to Freiberg.

Or maybe you know a prospective student who isn’t interested in getting their hands dirty. No matter—we can go the other way entirely. How about they spend some time learning in the cleanest room they’ve ever visited? No, not the dorm rooms, alas. We’re talking about the Nanotechnology Lab, a space kept so spotless that it’s certainly the cleanest lab of its sort in Montana, if not the whole Pacific Northwest. The lab has to be that clean, not to mention temperature and humidity controlled, to perform ultra-delicate fabrications of microscopic components. The tiny machines crafted there will end up on satellites, in consumer electronics, and wherever else a tiny, tiny bit (at least when it comes to size) of Butte ingenuity is needed.

If you think you’re beginning to detect a pattern, you’re right. Montana Tech has long been known for a practical, participatory approach to education fostered in the rough and tumble streets and mineshafts of the Richest Hill on Earth. If you ask me, it’s no coincidence that Montana Tech rests in one of the largest historic districts in the country. After all, copper harvested from the ground in Butte, America helped to light the world.

Now Montana Tech, with its focus on STEM and a demonstrated and long history of teaching responsible use of natural resources like petroleum, metals, and minerals, is continuing to light the way. They’re recognized as world experts in Restoration, an emergent field that combines industry with ecology. Alums who graduate from Montana Tech with a certificate in Restoration are much sought after in mining, of course, but also in fields like transportation, production, and energy, where they help to design and implement responsible and cost-effective solutions that are also sustainable. In addition, they focus on reestablishing native vegetation and restoring damaged landscapes, something that Butte knows a little something about—there are still those Butteians who remember a time when the hills around our fair city weren’t as green and verdant as they are now. A time when, before its own successful restoration, nothing much would grow in Butte.

The Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology (or MBMG for short) is another benefit to Montana Tech. Founded in 1919 as a nonregulatory state agency, the MBMG provides education and outreach and important research and technical assistance on the sound use of the Treasure State’s natural water and mineralogical resources. Ever since the beginning, the MBMG has been vital to Montana Tech. John Metesh, the director of the MBMG since 2012 and involved with the MBMG for another 23 years before that, points out that, “when considered as a whole, with state appropriation for our core programs and outside funding, the MBMG comprises about half the roughly $10 million of research conducted at Montana Tech each year.” The MBMG is frequently involved in studies of the environmental impact of mining, and is instrumental in helping to establish best practices in the field.

The MBMG, like Montana Tech and Butte itself, is always improving—they have recently begun providing direct support to a new doctoral program in Earth Science and Engineering that Metesh says, “incorporates efforts of existing degrees at Montana Tech and the MBMG. In addition to undergraduate and graduatelevel engagement, the MBMG has several areas of research that may directly support the new program that includes geology, hydrogeology, and geochemistry.”

Best of all, for those Montana Tech students who may be dining on Top Ramen and Cliff Bars, the MBMG employs a lot of people, including graduate and undergraduate students, in positions from data entry to full-time research professionals.

While mining is and probably always will be the backbone of the school, students at Montana Tech can find experiential learning in other fields as well. Tech’s Nursing program, to take a representative example, is estimated to grow by 50% following the construction of a state-of-the-art 5000-square-foot $1.7 million Simulation Lab. The innovative facility can be flexed and shifted to

accurately replicate the conditions of hospital, office, and home settings and will feature an actual working nurse’s station and medication room. Montana Tech’s nursing program is already amazingly effective, with 100% of students getting a job upon graduation and 80% securing employment before graduation, but the Lesar Family Nursing Simulation Center, scheduled to open in January 2022, will make it even more competitive.

Incredibly, the Nursing Simulation Center and the Orphan Boy aren’t even the only innovative, world-class experiential laboratories on campus—last, but certainly not least, are the Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories Power-Systems Labs, four high-tech laboratory spaces, constructed in part thanks to a $1.5 million donation by the Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, that give students safe ways to experiment with electricity while working towards the ultimate goal of researching and designing products that protect and control the power grid. It’s an absolute game-changer for Montana Tech, since there are very few schools in the United States with power labs as sophisticated as these. The field of ensuring the flow of safe energy, not to mention the parallel field of maintaining the power grid in the face of natural, solar, and cyber-security-related events, will only make jobs in that sector more important. Energy companies are going to look for hires that have extensive, practical experience in addition to a foundation in theory, and the SEL Power Labs at Montana Tech are going to guarantee that Montana Tech graduates have a heads up on the competition. Look, the simple version is this: Montana Tech is one of the most unique institutions in the country. Students encounter unheard of hire rates after graduation, and go out into the world armed with real-world experience to augment their theory and book learning. Heck, even just the physical plant of the school itself, perched on a hill overlooking one of the prettiest views in the whole state (which is tantamount to saying ‘the world’) and offering quick, easy access to dozens of hiking trails, streams, and natural wonders, is exceptional. And, of course, there’s Butte herself, as historical, beautiful, and friendly a big little town as you can find west of the Continental Divide.

Sure, students might get those hands dirty, get a little Butte soil in their eyes, have to don some of those little white lab booties on their feet, might even have to put on some gloves or monitor some very high voltages, or the heart monitor of a simulated patient.

Don’t worry. The students like it that way.

You might say that, like Butte, Montana Tech is full of rugged individuals. Or at least people who see the value in a little hard work.