Seventeen years ago, a single West Point academic department invited external guests to witness the applied research its cadets had done in support of the Army and the Department of Defense. From such humble beginnings has sprung Projects Day, the United States Military Academy’s annual showcase of presentations, poster sessions, theses defenses, performances and more that represent the best of cadet intellect, creativity, and tenacity. This year, 13 academic departments, along with the Department of Physical Education and the Department of Military Instruction, took part in Projects Day. Speaking at a luncheon for donors, whose contributions to the Margin of Excellence help fund many of the projects seen on Projects Day, BG Tim Trainor ’83, Dean of the Academic Board, said, “It’s simply an amazing day at West Point.”
From the ballroom of the West Point Club to the labs of Bartlett Hall and in various venues all over the Academy, nearly 400 projects were on display at this year’s Project Day. One cadet was even outside between buildings to display the results of the Astronomy Club’s balloon satellite launch.
While the projects were varied, representing the academic interests of the cadets’ home department (for example, statistical analyses for the Department of Mathematical Sciences or international case studies for the Department of Foreign Languages), they all had one element in common. “I think all the projects extend problem-solving skills beyond the classroom,” said CDT Jacob Browning ’16, one of the team members of the Chem-E-Car Design Project. CDT Kaeliegh Warfield ’16, who worked with three other cadets in establishing a new observatory on the roof of Bartlett Hall for taking astro-photography and deep-space images, put it another way. “It’s not about the contents of the cadet projects, but rather the context surrounding them,” she said. “That is, figuring out ways to fix things when they go wrong and keeping faith in oneself to get the job done.”
Other factors seemed to unite cadets surrounding Projects Day. Most spent an average of eight-to-ten hours a week outside of their normal assignments working on their projects, and all seem to relish the opportunity to present their projects to an audience (“Although we all go crazy with stress the night before,” admitted CDT Tucker Favreau ’16, who worked with four other cadets on the Black Hat Risk project, which blended math, psychology, international relations, and computer science to calculate the risk of a force being detected while hacking into an enemy computer network). As BG Trainor remarked, one can readily hear the excitement and passion in the cadets’ voices when they discuss their projects. “Projects Day is meant to inspire a passion for lifelong learning,” said Trainor. By this measure, Projects Day is not just an amazing day at but also a marvelous success for West Point.