Cadets typically begin their research programs in the fall semester of their final year, working toward a final report at the annual pre-graduation symposium with the guidance of faculty advisers. Working in teams of four to six – and alternating the role of team leader – they usually pursue suggestions solicited from the Coast Guard fleet. As an accredited two-semester class, the project can significantly affect the cadets’ final class standing.

“The number of projects varies year to year, but typically there are seven to 10 ideas submitted and, depending on the number of cadets in that major, we may take on four to six of those,” Hatfield said. “The faculty advisers try to stretch the cadets a little, providing for some intellectual growth, not just finding a solution.”

A civil engineering major – and daughter of an Academy graduate – 1st Class Cadet Katie Schumacher was commissioned in May and deployed to the CGC Midgett. In her final year, she was part of a team who developed a prototype shipboard graywater treatment plant designed to bring discharge released by Coast Guard vessels into compliance with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations and reduce cutter fleet operational downtime caused by the need to moor in order to pump graywater tanks pierside.

Graywater is wastewater from activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing; blackwater, on the other hand, is from toilets, urinals, and sinks with garbage disposals.

Although Schumacher’s first choice among six proposals, it was a risky one; it had been done before, with previous concepts scuttled by funding constraints. Her team chose to switch from the 225-foot buoy tenders used before to the Coast Guard’s smaller river tenders, which have an EPA waiver to discharge graywater directly overboard.

“The solution we came up with is funneling all graywater into a membrane bioreactor to undergo biological treatment, then be pumped through a membrane filter before being dumped overboard,” she said. “If we can adapt it to fit on different sizes of boats on the river, the next step would be a 225-foot cutter. Then it could be tried with blackwater as well as gray and scaled to fit most of the vessels in the Coast Guard fleet.”

Beyond the potential value of the cadet projects to the Coast Guard, however, was what they provided to the cadets themselves.

“We realized we had to adapt our leadership skills to the individuals we work with as a team. It’s important to know each person’s strengths, weaknesses, schedules, demands on their time, etc. So we tried to capitalize on those areas of strength, while helping [to] strengthen them,” Schumacher said.

Cadet 1st Class Robert Costolo – deployed in May to the CGC Sherman – was a mathematics major in operations research and computer analysis (ORCA). He and another ORCA major joined four government majors on the West African maritime study for the Department of Defense’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM). That included interagency field research trips to Washington, D.C., and to West Africa. The latter included working with the Africa Partnership Station – a series of international activities relating to maritime concerns – and Naval Forces Europe-Africa, among other organizations.

Proposed by the chief of AFRICOM’s air maritime branch, retired Coast Guard captain and former Academy commandant of cadets, Philip Heyl, it was one of the more international and multiagency CRS projects.

“We went through him and the desk officers to interface with AFRICOM, including getting their strategic plan and what they felt the agencies working in Africa should be moving toward,” Costolo said. “We [were] looking at evaluating the alignment of U.S. government agency efforts toward maritime security and safety capacity-building.”