Dean's Weekly, June 23rd

Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering

CME/SE Student-Faculty Team Undertakes Corrosion Awareness Project.

CME Cadets Kristen Smeland, Aaron Proctor, Spencer Collazos, and Rex Griffin with faculty advisors Dr. John Rogers of Civil and Mechanical Engineering and MAJ Patrick Sullivan of Systems Engineering conducted a capstone project to raise awareness of corrosion among junior Army leaders. One of the cadets’ products is a video designed to introduce the topic.

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CfRztxglCkc to see the USMA video.

The photo below shows the West Point team with members of the New York Army National Guard Combined Support Maintenance Shop (CSMS) A at Camp Smith, Cortlandt Manor, NY, where a majority of filming was done for the video. The team visited Camp Smith on 30 January 2015.

The project is sponsored by the DoD Corrosion Policy and Oversight Office (CPO). The team briefed their project to the CPO on 28 April 2015. The USMA Cadets and faculty heard presentations by the Naval Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, and the Air Force Academy at the April meeting.

Click www.corrdefense.org for more information about the CPO, including additional videos and corrosion news. Click http://www.corrconnect.org/ for educational information, course links, podcasts, and news. Click http://www.nace.org/home.aspx for information about NACE, the professional society for corrosion prevention and to see more information about corrosion.

Department of English and Philosophy

Shakespeare’s War Plays AIAD

The Department of English and Philosophy’s Shakespeare’s War Plays AIAD provided six Cadets the opportunity to experience five of Shakespeare’s plays at home and abroad. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, curators led a hands-on study on the history of the book, print culture, and materiality of Shakespeare’s “First Folio” and Hamlet (first quarto), Holinshed’s Chronicles, and other rare books. In England, Cadets visited Richard III’s grave, museum, and remains excavation site; explored the British Library, Westminster Abbey, Stratford upon Avon, and the Tower of London; and received instruction on staging combat. Additionally, they paired their readings with performances at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at Boscobel, in Garrison, New York.

Implications of the Utopian Impulse AIAD

Ethical

Cadets and LTC Mercer traveled to Los Angeles for a half-day workshop at SciFutures, a company who writes science-fiction narratives that explore ethical implications of new technologies and then builds prototypes for corporate clients. This workshop emphasized the importance of storytelling and demonstrated how ethics apply to real-life issues in conjunction with technological advancements. Cadets then spent the afternoon at Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the Mars 2020 Rover project. Cadets viewed the Mars Yard and several Mars 2020 prototypes, the “dark room,” or command center, where the Mars Curiosity rover sends and receives daily messages, saw the prototype for drilling and caching samples on Mars to be retrieved on a later mission, and talked with engineers who supervise various aspects of the project. In Silicon Valley, Cadets explored Facebook’s remote internet platforms project and examined the ethics of implementation of such platforms into daily life. Cadets spoke with Facebook executives and tried out Crescent Bay, Facebook’s latest prototype for virtual reality goggles. Cadets had lunch with several graduates of USMA and other former military service members who now work for Facebook. Cadets spent an afternoon at Google [X] and visited the Loon Project, a platform for internet availability via hot air balloons, watched the driverless Google cars, and discussed Google [X]’s project selection process. Finally, Cadets spent a day in Davis, California, with author Kim Stanley Robinson for lunch. Through study, reflection, and mentorship by leading technologists, Cadets developed a greater understanding of the need for humanities in conjunction with STEM in order to understand the ethical implications of new technologies that may lead toward utopia.

Writing Today AIAD

For “Writing Today,” 26 May – 4 June, six Cadets traveled to Washington D.C. to explore the vital roles that writing and its teaching play across the disciplines in university educations, the news media, political and intelligence communities, and the personal lives of veterans. Led by Dr. Jason Hoppe and LTC Sean Cleveland, Cadets participated in seminars with faculty from Johns Hopkins and the Naval Academy; training sessions with senior CIA analysts and CSA speechwriters; and, informational workshops with White House speechwriters, reporters at NPR and CNN, the founder of the Veterans Writing Project, and Smithsonian curators and archivists. Through this intensive study, which also involved the completion of a series of reflective journals, analytic reports, speeches, and peer tutoring exercises, Cadets developed not only individually as writers and communicators but also socially as teachers and mentors who will better counsel their peers in company tutoring, in consultations at the West Point Writing Center, and in the Army of tomorrow.