“They say that here at MMA the chicken’s mighty fine; well, mine jumped off the table and began to march in time.” 

I’ve said before that food is the first most important morale factor on a ship. Our food service department here at Maine Maritime Academy is a very hard working group.

Before Christmas vacation began, the department’s industrial dishwasher broke down for good, and eight weeks later, the crew is still working on getting a replacement. In the meantime, the staff must work to keep the level of garbage down as low as they can, because we eat off of paper plates and from plastic cups in the meantime.

Everyone is a little grumpy about it—staff and students alike—but these storms happen in the life of every sailor, and this kind is easy to weather.

Another storm that seems to have passed and left us in brighter sunlight than before is first semester.

Everyone here says that first semester of sophomore year is the hardest academic semester for every major this school has to offer. While that means we get it out of the way sooner rather than later, it also means that as we conquer this semester, we also are bearing the first heavy leadership responsibility.

Time management for a midshipman training officer during the six-week training period called MUG Month is all-important, for the MTOs have a lot of work to do on both the training front and the academic front.

This spring semester nobody is any less busy, but the classes have gotten much easier. Most students by second semester of the second year have completed their core education classes—calculus, physics, humanities”¦ all of those things that nobody wants to take because they have no immediate application to our majors. Now we can delve solely into what makes college fun—actually studying our chosen passions.

Adam Neubert, Catherine Bailey, Allyson Sawyer, Brooks Gray and others are in their fourth semester of a five-year program called Marine Systems Engineering—the single hardest major this academy has to offer.

Rather than learning to be operational or technical engineers, systems students learn how to design and see the theory behind all of this machinery as well as operate it. They will go on to be marine engineers for some time, but their worlds also include naval architecture, power equipment construction and more. Their classes this semester include Diesel Technology, Engineering Mathematics, Thermodynamics and plenty more.

Steven Bell, Sean O’Connor, Gabrielle Wells, Austin Bottorf, myself and others in the deck-license program are now taking the navigation and ship handling classes we’ve been waiting so long for. We study electronic navigation, celestial navigation, meteorology and more. Those of us in the limited tonnage program, which gives us a 1,600-ton ocean license upon graduation, are currently studying in a seminar and topics class for our 200-ton mate licenses.

Many people do not understand the standards of U.S. Coast Guard exams. Some sections are more important than others, so they are harder to pass. However, the world of the D letter grade is no more. All students of nautical science must pass their classes with a C or better. When taking the exam, license candidates must get a 70 percent on three different sections: deck general, deck safety and navigation general. But there are two sections imperative to every mariner: chart plotting and navigation rules, or navigational law. These sections require 90 percent or better to pass, and we all study fervently for them.

As we plow through the second semester and look forward to the summer’s excitement, the storm clouds move away and leave us to our chosen studies, where each of us begins to ply the craft we came here to train in. Spirits are high, and while the work is more enjoyable, we are no less busy than at any other time.

Benjamin Stevens of Islesford (Little Cranberry Island) is a sophomore at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.