cadet blogs

Opportunities and Adventures

(Academics, Class of 2012) Permanent link All Posts

I enjoy cold weather, so I have not been satisfied with the warm October and November that we are having out here in the Northeast. So what did I decide to do? I decided to go to Florida for a day. And I came back a changed/changing person.

I have been trying to find a highly interesting and exciting senior design project/independent study for almost a year now. I spent the summer thinking about it, as well as the beginning of this fall semester trying to decide between three projects that did not interest me. But at the Innovation Expo in Florida, I found the project, and now I just have to put my evolving plan into action.

The Innovation Expo is an annual Coast Guard event. It is held in a Convention Center with a large room devoted to hundreds of booths filled with anything from stations’ projects to businesses and corporations trying to sell their product to the Coast Guard. I attended the Expo in support of a senior design project promoting a greener Coast Guard through culture change and the implementation of green technology nationwide. The Expo’s theme was “green” and there was a section of the room with green carpeting and green booths. It was great. We shared the ideas with active duty and retired Coast Guard officers and found that other people were doing similar things. I found a potential summer internship for my 1/c summer in Juneau, Alaska, and I caught the green bug.

Now, I want to prove to myself that green is worth it. Some people claim that it wastes more energy than it saves or that it is more trouble than it is worth. I am not in a position to refute these people until I have done my research; thus, it is research that I intend to do. But in the meantime, I am not taking another plastic bag from the store when I have twenty in my drawer and three reusable bags in my closet.

More about Katie.

Posted by Leann Strickland at 2/8/2012 2:08 PM