Norway 2019

Day 5: June 28, 2019      This morning the students wrapped up the topic on Green Ports. After the presentation was finished the students worked with their groups to finalize their PowerPoints. Each group presented their topic to the class regarding the "PESTEL" acronym and on the port they were assigned.       After the presentations the group grabbed a quick lunch and headed to the port of Drammen. At the port the group received an interesting presentation on the background information of the port and then they got to take a bus tour of the entire port. The tour was very interesting and the students were excited to see what an actual port looked like for the first time.    The students are excited that it is Friday and they will be able to explore the area and finally catch up on some sleep! 

Day 4: June 27, 2019             Boy it was nice seeing fresh faces today! The extra two hours of sleep the cadets got this morning did justice. Today the students learned about Green Ports from an experienced professor from Liverpool John Moores University. The group learned about balancing environmental challenges with economic demands. Tomorrow the students will be visiting Drammen Port and they will apply the information they learned today with what they will explore tomorrow. This is the first time that the students will be visiting a port in their MMA career, and they are very excited to take what they have been learning in the classroom from their time in Norway and at MMA and see the pieces all come together.             In the classroom today the students learned about trade growth (increased port capacity requirements due to increasing vessel sizes), the infrastructure/superstructure of ports, the differences between public and private ports, and the ge

Day 3: June 26, 2019             Today the students stayed local at the USN campus. All of the cadets quickly learned the bus routes and they are all pros at getting from their dorms to the University. The area the students are living is a fifteen-minute walk from the main campus, or a five-minute bus ride (which comes every fifteen minutes) therefore, it is important the students use their time management skills to calculate the time needed to get to campus for 0750.             The cadets enjoy being in class with the international students. Many students are from Norway, however there are students from Argentina, Spain, and the Ukraine. All of the students get along very well, and they are learning cultural differences and asking many questions. The government and standards of living is very different from the United States, and the students are fascinated by the cross-cultural differences. Every now and then the local students will start speaking to each other in No

Day 2: June 25, 2019             Today the students visited the Shipowner’s Association in Oslo. Throughout the duration of the day the students listened to nine very experienced speakers in the Maritime Industry. A plethora of the information that the students received was new information about the specialized field. To begin the day, we got a brief background of the history of the Oslo’s chapter of the Norwegian Shipowner’s Association. The topics discussed during the first half of the day included Maritime Economics and the Norwegian Maritime Cluster – an innovation driven journey through structural changes (from Erik Jakobsen, Menon Economics AS), and the global climate challenge reaching the IMO 2050 target.              After the three hours of presentations we got a break for lunch. Lunch was quite a surprise for many of us. When we heard that we were getting sandwiches we were thinking maybe a turkey club, however, these sandwiches had raw shrimp on t