Col. Mike Fossum, Superintendent of Texas A&M Maritime in Galveston, was our speaker last Wednesday. He shared that the campus in Galveston has 2154 students in seventeen degree programs and 150 faculty in nine departments. The campus had approximately five hundred students on the campus just five years ago. The students have access to unique degree programs which can result in exceptional careers in the Blue (Marine) Economy. They offer fourteen undergraduate and seven graduate programs. They also offer five license options for the marine industry. Because there is so much demand for maritime graduates, the starting salary for graduates has been in the range of $120,000, and Marine Engineering graduates have received offers of over $200,000.

The students on the Galveston campus do a lot of the same things that are done on the main campus. They have yell leaders and yell practices at midnight and then go up to the College Station campus on Friday night and do it again with the rest of the students. They have an Aggie ring statue on the campus as well, but there is only one Reveille mascot, and she comes to visit their campus a couple of times a year.

The campus has an older ship acquired about a year ago on which many of the cadets train. During the semester, they are in classrooms learning, but during the summer, they train on the ship for about seventy days, as required by the Coast Guard. Col. Fossum will spend two or three weeks with them on the ship. Part of the time they work shift work, four hours on and eight hours off. They work on all areas of the ship – the bridge, the engine room, the deck, the chart room plotting their course manually with paper charts. The engine room is a seven-story engine room, and it is about 150 degrees in there. If something breaks, they fix it, with supervision by the full-time crew. They expect to get a new ship that is currently being built in the Philadelphia shipyard in late 2025. It will be the first ship built as a training ship and a disaster response ship. It has a roll-on, roll-off deck to load the ship with generators, food, and water. They can get anywhere in the Gulf from Brownsville to Key West in less than two days in the event of an emergency. The ship will be able to handle up to a thousand people in a humanitarian crisis.

Col. Fossum also talked about his experience as an astronaut, a dream of his from the age of eleven. He became a flight test engineer in the Air Force after graduating from A&M, which he attended on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. As a flight test engineer, he sat in the back seat of an F15 after attending flight test school in the Air Force. As soon as he completed the training, he had what he needed to apply at NASA. He was declined. After about five years in the Air Force, he moved to Houston and went to work for NASA as an engineer. After thirteen years of applying to become an astronaut, he was accepted on his seventh application. He flew two missions on the Space Shuttle and took numerous space walks each time and then was assigned to the Space Station for a half year as Commander and Space Walker. So far, he is the only Aggie to serve as an astronaut.

Col. Fossum has had an extremely interesting career and now is the leader of a school that is preparing young people for exciting careers that are much in demand. It was a very entertaining and interesting program.