GIA student

Pay in the destination countries

Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.

What does the day look like?

You work seated at a grading bench in a commercial lab such as GIA, HRD Antwerp or IGI, 8 hours per shift, 40 hours per week. High-volume intake sites add night shifts and weekend rotations. Your tools: 10x triplet loupe, stereo zoom microscope with darkfield, brightfield and fluorescent light, standard refractometer with contact liquid to limit 1.81, hydrostatic balance, polariscope with conoscope, diffraction spectroscope, 365 nm and 254 nm UV cabinets, DiamondView, DiamondSure, FTIR and Raman spectrometers, LIMS plotting software and Sarine DiaMension scanners, plus ultrasonic baths for cleaning.

Time splits as 70% manual grading — comparing loose polished diamonds with master stones for color, grading clarity from Flawless to I3 at 10x, plotting inclusions and blemishes in software and checking measurements; 20% screening on automated UV and spectroscopic detectors for lab-grown diamonds, glass filling, radiation treatment or fracture-filled emeralds, then verification in immersion cells; 10% handling — barcode scans, parcel tracking, balance calibration and database logs. Forget royal jewels and ruby mines: 90% of entry-level work is repetitive microscopy under fluorescent lights in a windowless room, moving through 100+ identical round brilliants against an hourly quota.

Where does this lead?