And... now they're messing with me. Delayed me by 5 days so I don't leave til the 4th. But they've paid $1400 for the ticket (non-transferrable and all that jazz), so I strongly suspect I wont be delayed again...
Aaanyway...
Mef: Your uni, if it's any good, will be doing its damndest to set you up with vac work, so talk to your lecturers, check the noticeboards in your department etc. etc. (Noticeboard was how I got mine - the company e-mailed the geology department) Also go to career days, but you probably wont get anywhere with any of the big companies (BHP, Rio, Newmont etc.) unless your marks are top notch, and, to be frank, you probably don't want to.
Unless you get into a graduate program (which are good in terms of diversity of experience and ****, but with less than brilliant pay), any experience gained with a small company is going to be of a higher calibre than at a big company because there're fewer geos and you're generally doing more interesting, diverse work. Moreover, smalll companies mean you can access the upper echelons easier, both in terms of talking to them and getting promoted (eventually). Basically, I've heard only bad things about most of the bigger miners. As for finding work after Uni, beleive me - If you graduate within the next... five or so years, and get some kind of field experience through vac. work, you'll not have any trouble. The guy who interviewed me reckons that GBS could put on a dozen geos tomorrow if they could find them, and the situation is the same all over australia (and likely to stay that way for quite some time).
As for nuggets and the like, well, I doubt it. There's a little bit of quartz vein deposit, but it's mostly distributed sulphide stuff. Basically, it looks like a very boring, very heavy black rock. But you can make gold out of it.
