Abstract
The higher education arm of the Minerals Council of Australia, the Minerals Tertiary Education Council (MTEC), and three universities formed the Metallurgical Education Partnership (MEP) in 2007 to create industry-relevant collaborative education projects in metallurgy. MEP's first collaborative project, the Process Design Project (PDP), is now in its fourth year. The aim of PDP is to give final year extractive metallurgy and chemical engineering students in-depth experiences working in teams to design a mineral processing plant using real, live industry data. A key component of the PDP project is a week-long introductory workshop conducted at the beginning of second semester and attended by all student participants. The aim of this intensive, workshop include providing students technical information about the commodity being considered and the design process in general. Online student surveys and interviews have provided baseline data related to the student experiences of PDP during the initial three years of the program.