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Mining software guru shares inspirational tales from globe-spanning career
One wouldn’t think a computer science degree and a career in technical support would lead to climbing mountains and flying planes over Africa or shooting rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) in Mongolia. For Robert Patterson, it did.
And he was happy to talk about how obtaining a degree from Laurentian University led to all that and the founding of his current business, Minalytix, a mining software company, during a Nov. 16 talk hosted by the Sudbury chapter of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.
While his lighthearted talk spanned his entire life, peppered with many self-deprecating stories, the message was clear: do a job well, never stop learning and have some fun with your life.
“I never thought my degree would take me around the world and I’d be doing all these things, but it did. Your degree does not limit what you will do with your life,” Patterson said.
Describing himself as tech support and an entrepreneur, he passed on many tips as he took the audience, made up mostly of mining and engineering students, for a tour of his life, from his parents enrolling him in violin and French classes (and making him stick it out) to choosing his career path, which he said boiled down to staying in Sudbury, going to Laurentian, and choosing between kinesiology, engineering or computer sciences.
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