So the Training Ship State of Maine is actually a vessel that's owned by the US Maritime Administration, and we use it for training all of our unlimited licensing students. And they'll go out for a freshman cruise the end of their freshman year and then a junior cruise the end of their junior year. That's when a lot of the underway training happens. The juniors are out there learning celestial navigation, if they're deck students. They're learning how to run the engine room, if they're engineering students-- the freshmen are dipping their toes into everything we can think of on the deck side and on the engineering side and really learning how to work safely at sea.
Cadet shipping is also a chance to practice their craft at sea, but also learn what the industry model is about-- commercial shipping is all about, so their sophomore year they are assigned a ship with a company and they'll spend either 60 or 90 days at sea with a ship's crew engaged in commerce and transportation.
I've had two internships since I've been at the Academy. The first was with a professor here in Boothbay at Bigelow laboratories. And I was doing phytoplankton research, looking at different forms of phosphorus as an energy source for those phytoplankton. And then this summer, I did a virtual internship with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration,
Our Oceanography students will go out and work in research labs or on research vessels on whatever whatever direction their studies want to take them. And then our shoreside engineering students will go out and work in power plants, places like that.
