Guardians,
I had the opportunity to visit North Carolina A&T University earlier in my tenure and discuss opportunities for partnering with them. Rear Admiral Tom Ostebo, our head "red ragger," has established a personal partnership with NCA&T that culminated recently in a formal agreement. The guest post below is by CAPT Ed Gibbons, Commanding Officer, Aviation Logistics Center, Elizabeth City, North Carolina. This is part of a larger program whereby Coast Guard senior leaders establish partnerships with minority serving institutions of higher learning.
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Guest Blog from Captain Ed Gibbons
Rear Admiral Tom Ostebo, Assistant Commandant for Engineering and Logistics and North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T) Chancellor, Dr. Harold L. Martin, Sr, signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on Wednesday, 17 February, 2010 at the Chancellor's Greensboro, NC campus office. The MOA establishes a formal partnership between the USCG and NC A&T, and optimizes engagement efforts between the USCG's Engineering and Logistics Directorate and NC A&T's College of Engineering, School of Business and Economics, and School of Technology.
This partnership is designed to work in tandem with the Coast Guard’s overall civilian and military officer recruiting effort, while assisting NC A&T by providing additional academic options and tuition-saving choices for NC A&T professors and students. By executing this MOA, NC A&T students will have summer internship opportunities at the Coast Guard's Aviation Logistics Center (ALC) in Elizabeth City, NC, and assist the ALC by having College of Engineering students design their Capstone or senior research projects around real world, critical, industrial processes. In addition, the MOA formalizes the conduit for similar internship opportunities between NC A&T and other USCG Logistics Centers.
This strategic alliance between NC A&T, one of the nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), enables the Coast Guard to provide student to work on meaningful service iniatives while simultaneously giving the students academic credit and real life job experience. This collaborative effort also accelerates NC A&T's Logistics and Transportation Systems cluster initiative, which strives to achieve high quality, human centered, applied logistics and transportation systems research, and the development of a logistics and transportation focused workforce by establishing mutually beneficial, long term partnerships with federal and military agencies.
