"They were head and shoulders above" Case-In 2016 Finale

The history of the championship dates back to 2013. At that time, competitions were held to solve cases – as close to reality as possible tasks that need to be carefully analyzed and the best possible solution found for them – in the field of mining. Teams from 11 universities competed. Two years later, the rules of the championship were expanded with leagues on geological exploration and electric power industry. The first champions in the last of them were students of Irkutsk National Research Technical University. 

"This time there were five or seven very strong teams here, so the victory was akin to winning the lottery - it was decided by tenths of a point," says Konstantin Suslov, professor at the Department of Power Supply and Electrical Engineering at the Institute of Energy of the IRNTU. – The competition between the leading universities was very high. Besides, it is clear that we would not have been given the first place for the second time in a row." There were still considerable chances to compete for victory in two leagues: Mining and Geological Exploration (unfortunately, our Polytechnic University was unable to field teams in the oil and gas industry and metallurgy, which were held for the first time). Irkutsk residents took full advantage of one of them. 

"According to the principle 

good people"

"When, after reaching the finals, they wrote an article about us in the student newspaper, I was against the provocative application that was made in it: allegedly we said that we would bring victory from Moscow," recalls Ekaterina Piskovets, Master of the Department of Management and Logistics in Transport at the Institute of Aircraft Engineering and Transport of the IRNTU. "But deep down, I was sure that we had won." By the way, reaching the finals of the championship itself was a pleasant surprise: at the qualifying stage, the strongest team was considered to be graduate students led by Larisa Auzina, Associate professor of the Department of Applied Geology at the Institute of Subsoil Use of the IRNTU. But it was won by the Earth Center, which, by and large, had no specialized specialists: neither Nazar Nazarov, a master's degree in hydrogeology, nor Sergey Permyakov, a student of surveying, nor Tatiana Zimina, an innovation management manager and, concurrently, an electric power engineer, are considered such. 

The team's triumph can by no means be explained by chance – it is not for nothing that it deserved to win the championship final, beating competitors from leading specialized universities in Russia. "When the guys were performing, I specifically went to listen to them: they were head and shoulders above everyone else,– Suslov states. – Then I talked with the experts from the jury, who recognized: "First place without talking at all." The professor emphasizes that an interdisciplinary approach helped: four representatives of different industries looked at the case, each of whom could notice something that the other had missed and offer a non-standard solution to the problem for a narrow-profile specialist. The presentation of the material also played a role: the presentation was designed according to all the rules, and the team that presented it adhered to a single "corporate" uniform. Probably, such difficult-to-measure components as psychological compatibility and complementarity, which often "shoot out" in some sports or intellectual competitions like "What? Where? When?". "As Nazar, our captain, says, the team gathered on the principle of good people, not good specialists," Ekaterina says, grinning. – Tanya and I work together, I know Sergey from the student council and I remembered him when we needed a mining boy. And we're meeting with Nazar." 

The championship, however, did not become a very easy ride for the pleasant company. The task received before the qualifying stage initially caused a slight panic – it seemed that you needed to have special knowledge to solve it. But he had enough developed erudition, coupled with the ability to easily perceive new information and understand any topic, even if it was not too familiar. "The case describes in detail what can lead you to victory," Piskovets continues. "You just have to follow all these points without missing anything." However, sometimes it is worthwhile to go a little beyond the conditions of the task: instead of justifying the attractiveness of one of the four sections of the Enachinsky node, the "Center of the Earth" took two. 

"We took rough figures"

The task, I must say, was known in advance – in the final, which took place on May 30-31 at the National Research Technical University MISIS (former Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. – "SE"), it remained only to present her ready-made solution. It consisted in preparing a project for the development of an ore node located in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the south of the Yano-Adychansky geological and economic region and with some gold and silver resources. There is not a single settlement for 60 kilometers around (the nearest village, Barylas, is 70 km to the northwest), instead of existing roads there are winter roads. The area is poorly developed, but reserves of gold, silver, tungsten and antimony have been explored on its territory. According to the Russian Federal Geological Fund, prospecting for ore gold was carried out at the Enachinsky junction itself in 2012-2014, but they were not particularly successful – after they were completed, the right to use the subsoil was terminated. 

Anyway, the finalists of the Case-In championship needed to identify gold ore objects for exploration in 2016 and develop recommendations for their implementation. "In order to solve the case, we talked with professors and learned all the subtleties of geological exploration, studied many books on the development of the industry," notes Piskovets. – We have raised the statistics of the London Non-ferrous Metals Exchange on the value of gold and silver. In principle, this did not require any specific knowledge - the cases are rather aimed at identifying and developing erudition."

Having solved the problem, the "Center of the Earth" came to the conclusion that two sections of the ore node out of the four proposed ones are relatively promising – the Pier and the Western Pier. Both have estimated resources of one ton of gold and 52.6 tons of silver. But their development is not profitable – capital investments in the construction of a mining and processing plant will amount to about 12 billion rubles, while the cost of extracted metals will not exceed 4.7 billion rubles. "We took rough figures because we did not have accurate data and had to use the analog method," explains the interlocutor of Siberian Energy. But even approximate calculations confirmed a disappointing summary: with a profitability of 37.5%, the development of the Enachinsky predictive ore node does not make sense, but an investor who wishes to develop it can use modular processing plants for this. 

A team from the Northeastern Federal University named after M.K. Amosov came to a similar conclusion. She had knowledge of the local climatic and geological conditions on her side. The pitch played against it: the students from Yakutsk answered the experts' questions accurately, but not in detail. The team from the National University of Mineral Resources "Gorny", the oldest in our country and the second oldest industrial educational institution in the world, founded in St. Petersburg back in 1773, also seriously competed with the "Center of the Earth". "We were afraid that they would take the depth of knowledge," Ekaterina admits. – But I would not say that Nazar answered worse than them. On the contrary, some answers sounded better." At the same time, Irkutsk residents had to fight not only with worthy competitors, but also with external circumstances: the captain of the Earth Center fell ill upon arrival in Moscow, so they even had to call an ambulance. Nothing serious happened, and in part it played into the hands of the team.: The time that the others spent walking around the capital was spent preparing for the upcoming performance, in which the students of Irkutsk National Research Technical University turned out to be head and shoulders above the rest. 

A source Siberian Power Engineer