For many years, the Navy has recognized that developing a diverse, world-class workforce is critical to its ability to maintain technological superiority. Today’s great power competition has only sharpened focus on the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs, from elementary school to college.
“When the Chief of Naval Operations rolled out the Navigation Plan earlier this year, he reinforced the Navy’s commitment to having the best-trained and finest-educated naval force in the world that draws strength from its diversity,” said Dr. Brett Seidle, SES, Executive Director of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Warfare Centers and NAVSEA STEM Champion.
“In an era of long-term competition, achieving this end requires that we engage in robust programs of STEM education and outreach for students and educators from kindergarten through graduate school,” Seidle said. “The students we inspire today to pursue STEM may well become members of our workforce of tomorrow, or participants in the many academic and industrial partnerships that apply their creativity to solve naval challenges for the Navy of the future.”
The largest of the Navy’s five systems commands, NAVSEA recognizes that attracting the best and brightest to the mission and fostering excellence and innovation in the workforce go hand in hand. The NAVSEA STEM Campaign Plan, signed in August 2019, outlines goals and actions for NAVSEA commands to cultivate a “STEM talent pool with minds primed for innovation and technical leadership.”
NAVSEA’s STEM educational outreach efforts resulted in 106 programs in fiscal year 2020, involving a total of 2,003 technical team members across the enterprise and 35,000 engagement hours. The programs reached 63,000 students and 2,000 teachers – and all in spite of the coronavirus pandemic.
Having a well-organized, dedicated team of STEM coordinators that already had been sharing best practices and lessons learned from their well-established programs allowed the technical workforce to pivot STEM learning and continue to support local schools despite COVID-19 restrictions, coordinators said.
“Each site is slightly different in how they approach STEM with programs and logistics, but it is what organically fuels their community,” said Corinne Beach, STEM coordinator for Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility and NAVSEA STEM action officer.
“We have a strong and robust Community of Practice, so none of us are reinventing the wheel,” said Candida Desjardins, educational outreach director at Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport Division and NAVSEA STEM action officer.
During the past year, many lessons and even internships were supported virtually, and in-person programs were modified to run safely within COVID-19 guidelines, such as holding STEM camps outdoors with mask-wearing and social-distancing protocols in place. Commands produced and delivered STEM kits to local schools and families and created “lending libraries” with STEM resources. The outreach efforts allowed the programs to reach a broader audience of teachers and students both inside and outside of their geographic locations, and also to share programming across commands.
“I think offering virtual programming may open up our offerings to wider audience,” said Tina Closser, STEM outreach coordinator for Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane Division. “I also think in a way COVID has brought us closer together as Warfare Centers. Now, we’re able to share some of our virtual programming and kids in Indiana can see what they do in Warfare Centers in California or Washington.”
Importantly, the outreach also continued to inspire and develop the next generation of the STEM workforce.
Virtual programs offered by Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and NUWC Keyport Division at Quileute Tribal School, including discussing various career opportunities at the two commands, resulted in a student applying for and being accepted into the Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (SEAP) at NUWC Keyport Division, Beach said.
“Through the use of virtual tools, we were able to work with schools that traditionally we would not have due to geographical distance,” she said, noting that Quileute Tribal School is about three hours away in La Push, Washington. “Many teachers were thankful for the hands-on projects and our willingness and ability to connect with classes virtually. They shared so many great stories of students engaging when they hadn’t previously.”
STEM programs are only as successful as the mentors who support them, and 2020 was a challenging year for them as well. But the use of virtual platforms, including Microsoft Teams, allowed NSWC Dahlgren Division’s Combat Systems Readiness Division to continue to mentor students from Virginia Tech as part of a Naval Engineering Education Consortium (NEEC) grant to study Assisted Model-Based Systems Engineering (A-MBSE), said Randy Tucker, the division’s chief engineer.
One of the students has accepted an offer of employment with Naval Air Warfare Center, Patuxent River, and another student is interviewing for a similar position. “The strong performance of the Virginia Tech A-MBSE Senior Design Team during academic year 2020-2021 is a testament to the effectiveness of their preparation, their enthusiasm, and a proactive, forward-leaning academic mentorship program,” Tucker said.
NSWC Corona Division’s first virtual engagement with 13 students through the Naval Research and Engineering Internship Program (NREIP) in the summer of 2020 resulted in one intern being asked to share her summer research presentation with SEA21 (Director for Surface Ship Maintenance and Modernization) and two others being asked to stay on as summer hires, STEM Director Karon Myles said.
“There were additional Naval STEM programs to participate in virtually, and participation in the NREIP Fall Engagement (NFE) provided additional virtual mentoring experiences and the opportunity to engage student teams, which we hadn’t done before,” Myles added.
NSWC Philadelphia Division also participated in virtual NREIP and NFE programs, as well as offering virtual summer camps and other programs, which allowed the command to engage with more student interns in a calendar year than ever before, according to STEM Outreach Program Manager Tristan Wolfe – and make a positive impact on the future generation.
Annette M. Colón-Mercado, a chemistry major at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez who worked with mechanical, chemical and materials engineers on her project, said the program helped her understand the needs NAVSEA has “and how we, as students, have the potential to contribute through science.”
“From this experience I now have the motivation to expand my research at UPRM to other areas that can help in the finding of solutions to current problems,” she said. “One of the most important things I learned through this program is how every branch of science and engineering is needed to find a solution."
In addition, the lessons of the past year already are shaping future programming.
“We’ve really had to rethink and redesign how we do outreach and even how we do ‘inreach’ – meaning how we reach in and engage our workforce in these types of activities,” Wolfe said. “It has been a year since this all started and we’ve nearly redesigned every outreach program we have with a special focus on equity and program value.”
At Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, STEM Outreach Program Manager Libby Hite agreed that the pandemic actually provided opportunities – “to not only adapt to a virtual environment, but also to take a step back and look at what activities have the highest impact on students.”
Looking toward the future, “in a post-COVID world, our STEM Outreach program will bring forward a mixture of our pre- and post-COVID methods for administering STEM and working with educators,” she said. “While our volunteers are eager to get back into the schools and working closely with students, we plan to continue our efforts in bringing pop-up STEM events to communities across our region and providing virtual engagement. In doing so, we will have a larger reach than before the pandemic.”
Desjardins, who oversees the long-standing and popular Undersea Technology Apprentice Program (UTAP) at NUWC Newport Division – which ran a modified in-person version last summer for 41 students – said STEM coordinators across NAVSEA are capturing those kinds of lessons for future use. For example, she said, instructional videos can be shared with school teachers to offer to students during remote learning.
“We’ll also provide materials to the teacher in advance, and provide a virtual demo” of the project to share in class, she said.
“Everyone in the Navy is looking at this: How do we continue to reach out to these kids?” Desjardins said. “So, we’re gathering videos from each site, like discussions about buoyancy, the physics of a catapult, and an engineer’s career path. There is no reason why every Warfare Center Division and shipyard should have to recreate videos. We are all One Team.”
Dr. Corey Bergsrud, an engineer and innovator at NSWC Crane Division, has seen the benefits of STEM programs from both sides of the equation. A participant in the NREIP and Science, Math and Research Transformation (SMART) Scholarship programs – the latter of which brought him to NSWC Crane Division – Bergsrud has supported a variety of internship programs, including SEAP, NREIP, SMART, STEM Student Employment Program (SSEP), and National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) X-Force Fellows, since joining the command full-time in 2016.
“The experiences and opportunities that both NREIP and SMART provided, and the continued support to this day, is what gives Dr. Bergsrud that feeling of commitment and of service to give back to the people and our nation,” said Dr. Bryan Woosley, University Liaison at NSWC Crane Division. “As part of this, Dr. Bergsrud works as an innovation leader bringing communities together to create novel concepts, and to help guide the concepts to adopted practices.
“Moreover, Dr. Bergsrud gives back through mentoring interns as well as sponsoring student senior design projects,” to the tune of more than 25 senior students and at least six student projects, some of which have resulted in patent applications and Cooperative Research and Development Agreements. “Dr. Bergsrud understands the fresh new ideas interns and new hires can bring, and works to help them rapidly gain the skills and confidence they need.”
Bergsrud said that such programs, while requiring a lot of energy and resources, are a critical part of building and sustaining a technical workforce, which in turn is necessary for the United States to “keep a global competitive edge,” in terms of both technology and economic vitality.
“We need to accelerate, and to do that, we need to tap into the young workforce,” he said. “These are the folks that are going to be taking over; we have to give them the tools, training and platforms they need to be successful.”