Schreiner
senior accounting and finance major Jimmy
Fluegel closes his eyes as he tries to visualize what
kind of food he missed most during his five weeks surveying for gold
deposits in the northern Nevada mountains this summer.
“McDonald’s fries,” he intones, as if remembering
another life far away, “and Papa John’s pizza!”
Then he laughs and adds, “But there were plenty of times I would
have given up fries and pizza if I could have just had clean sheets
and a long hot shower.”
Fluegel’s summer job with the Canadian mining company ROMARCO
Minerals, on a project called “Buckskin National,” took
him a long way from any kind of fast food for most of the summer.
Fluegel was recruited for the job by Dr.
Diane Garrett, ROMARCO’s CEO and also assistant
professor of business administration at Schreiner. Garrett commutes
weekly between Kerrville and mine locations throughout North America,
bringing a wealth of experience to all of her business students at
Schreiner.
“My
job called for me to use a GPS (global positioning device) to walk
an invisible grid that ROMARCO had laid out using satellite technology,”
Fluegel recalls. At regular intervals he would stop and dig through
the hard dirt and rock to get to the “B” horizon. “I
knew when I hit the horizon because the appearance of the soil changed
dramatically,” Fluegel says. “Sometimes I could get to
it after just a few minutes digging; other times it took hours. If
the GPS locator said dig here, then that’s where I had to dig.
Just because the ground at that particular point was solid rock, or
an old stump, there was no leeway to move sideways even a few feet.
Each dig had to be at a precise point on the grid or all the data
would be thrown off.”
The nearest town to Fluegel’s remote location was Winnemucca,
Nev., although he didn’t even get to see the sights in Winnemucca
more than a few times during his assignment.
“Most of my time was spent above 8,000 feet,” Fluegel
recalls, “and there were times when I would go for days without
seeing anyone. I got up before sunrise and went to bed—if you
can call it a bed—when it got dark. I lived in a primitive cabin
with no electricity and no plumbing, though I did have solar hot water,
enough for a quick rinse basically. Once I ran out of hot water, my
only option was a bucket of very, very cold water,” he adds
with a grimace. “In retrospect,” Fluegel reflects, “I
guess it was a good thing that I wasn’t seeing too many other
people on a regular basis.”
World renowned University of Nevada geologist Tommy Thompson was Fluegel’s
field supervisor for the project. “Tommy said that he had never
met a young man he had more confidence in,” says Garrett. “He
told me that Jimmy consistently gave 120 percent effort and that he
would take him back over any other candidate, any time.”
“Jimmy is a very determined young man,” smiles Dr. Garrett.
“We normally use graduate students from the Nevada School of
Mines to do this kind of exacting, difficult field work, but Jimmy
heard about the job and began working on me to let him do it.”
Garrett shakes her head, “Every time I turned around, there
was Jimmy, but always in a quiet, unobtrusive way, letting me know
that he wanted the job and was sure he could do it right.”
Fluegel agrees that he was persistent and says, “It’s
one of the things I learned from my mom and dad—decide what
you want to do, figure out how you’re going to do it, and then
never give up.”
Asked if he considers himself different in this regard than his classmates,
he replies, “Well, not really. A lot of my friends are hard
workers who take pride in what they do, and they have a real work
ethic. What this job gave me was a chance to prove myself under some
pretty rugged conditions. Also I was alone a lot and that gave me
a great opportunity to think and reflect.”
“Jimmy is an unusual young person,” Dr. Garrett asserts.
“The job he took on requires precision, accuracy, physical strength,
mental stamina and a dedication to doing a tough, dirty, repetitive
job right every time.”
Dr. Garrett’s company searches for gold deposits in some of
the most remote areas of the United States and has developed a combination
of fieldwork technique and computer modeling that enables it to determine
in advance where test holes can be drilled with the highest expectations
of success.
“Accurate collection of the samples is critical to our process,”
Dr. Garrett explains. “If the person in the field slips up and
mislabels just a few samples, or if they are too tired to dig the
final test hole of the day just like they dug the first one, or if
they miss some other critical step, then the data we feed into our
models will produce inaccurate results. Problem is, we won’t
know the models are wrong until we’ve wasted hundreds of thousands
of dollars drilling where there’s no gold.”
A full scholarship student from Needville, Texas, Fluegel credits
growing up in a small town with giving him the sense of optimism that
drives his willingness to try new experiences.
“I’m just happy that I was able to convince Dr. Garrett
to give me a shot at proving myself,” Fluegel smiles. “One
of the best things about Schreiner is that the professors here have
so many connections around the world. My experience with Dr. Garrett’s
company is a great example of how the Schreiner network can open doors
for anyone with the desire to succeed.”
His summer experience in the Nevada mountains has changed the way
his friends look at him, says Fluegel. “I don’t know how
many times I’ve been asked to take my friends out gold hunting,”
he laughs. “They all want me to show them some of the nuggets
they think I found, and they’re kind of disappointed when I
tell them that I rarely saw any gold, and then it was only tiny specks.”
Fluegel acknowledges that in some ways it was hard to leave the solitude
of his mountain home and come back to civilization. “I experienced
a freedom and independence that I can literally taste, even now, months
later,” Fluegel says with a faraway look in his eyes. “My
cell phone didn’t work out there, which I didn’t mind
at all, except that I did find that I missed being able to get together
with my friends whenever I want. But that just made me appreciate
them more when I came home to Schreiner,” Fluegel says, “and
these days I find that I don’t even mind the occasional hassles
that seem inevitable when you’re around other people.”
advice
from Diane Garrett
As both a professor and a CEO Dr. Diane Garrett is in a position to
help students learn both academic and career skills. Here are some
examples of what she tries to help students understand in her class,
“Life Economics.”
• Decisions you make today will stay with you into many tomorrows.
• Sometimes you have to sacrifice present pleasure for future
satisfaction.
• Do even the most menial job 110% — people will notice.
• Seek opportunities to help others and don’t look for
credit for doing so.
• Look into the future 20–30 years and decide what you
want to be doing. Then make the decisions that will lead you to that
future.
• Take responsibility and don’t make excuses—no
dog ever ate anyone’s homework.
• Networking is the key to success. It really is “who
you know” that makes the difference between an average life
and a life full of opportunity.
Front Cover