This assistanship consisted of lecturing and assisting 27 students during the teoretical classes on the fisrt months of the course, helping to understand practical and the mineralogical concepts around the main economical resources of deposits. During the teoretical parts of the course, it also was done the main planning of transects and the making of geological maps for usage in site (reported geological units maps, main structures found and geological indicators maps such as %Clay, %Fe and Exposed rock where also made using spectral imaging.) On the last months of the course, it was done on two separated full week campaigns, a site study to determine its economic capability on a Fresnillo Chile site, to evaluate and help to improve for the students, map/model making and field practices like mineral identification and structure logging. The campaigns were on separate instances to:

1. Aliviate the students to assistant teachers ratio, getting to a 3 : 1 ratio on most of the student sub-groups. As well as to have room for all parties involved on the basecamp.
2. To ascertain and evaluate the differences/similitudes of the map-model-interpretation between the two groups, and help a fuller understanding of the site Geology and conditions.

The metodology of evaluation, while not being prejudicial to the students grade nor to their knowledge/skills adquired, did leave some room for improvement. For example, while the zone was widely know to the Main Professor and assistant teachers, the main details of the 4x4 km2 site where unknown. So, even with that considered for, the possibility of a knowledge bias between each week group has to be considered.

Also to be considered, between the two main groups of students, widely different transect making methodologies and conditions were met. The fisrt week group took on a structured, E-W transect lines, crossing directly through the woodland and main topologies on this directions, with the objective of having consistent information of lithologies, alteration condition, structures present. And it only had less than one week’s worth of repose from another field-study trip course.

• To the assistant teachers and the professor, this methodology and conditions of “ore-hounding” was what leaded to poor economic mineral and structure results. While lithology was extensively and greatly detailed, fatigue due to the previous field trip and poor terrain pass-through planning (thanks to the students trying to maintain a close track to the planned transect) lead them shrug off terrain indicators such as rubble coming from a vein or lode uphill, to avoid geomorphological indicators that could indicate main structures presence and ultimately, to not find any kind of valuable mineral resource. Contrastingly, the secoond week group, while it had pre-planned transects to go through main geomorphological-structural telltales and through some spectral imaging points of interest, as a whole group it adopted maleable and flexible transect planning, sacrificing orderly and easily understood transects for discussed and objectives of the day based transects that needed more on-site discussion and coordination.
• While still, a knowledge bias cannot be discarded on part of our group of teachers and better resting conditions, we discussed that, while this methodology did lead to tardier finish off-work for the students and quite some dedidated discussions, it undeniably also lead to: more detailed contacts between lithologies and structures, more vein findings (on consequence, even some findings of surface sulphosalts) and a better model of the site overall. This methodology can be greatly beneficial for site evaluation and field work, but it requires a real lot of communication skills, inmmediate planning and some really nice pre-field understanding of the site. If it is misused or badly executed, it can develop on poorly used resources to a company.

In the end I want to accentuate these last important points.

You can and will plan for a lot, but improvisation and objective-minded planning are two great skills to always have at your disposal.

We as Geologist are humans, even if we want to be rock-hounds. Conditions linked to field-stay will always matter.

You have to trust on your coworkers and fellow students, but to be indifferent and not communicate effectively your knowledge and concerns is your responsability too. And it will affect the final work