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Designing a ship or submarine for the U.S. Navy requires an understanding of naval architecture, hydrodynamics, electrical and structural engineering, materials science, and more. That’s why the Navy works so closely with MIT, where some of the world’s foremost experts in each of those disciplines converge.
The largest among the graduate-level naval programs at MIT is the 2N Graduate Program in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. The three-year 2N program helps naval officers work at the intersection of different academic disciplines to design ships and submarines from the ground up and solve the complex technical problems that arise from completing missions on the sea.
“The 2N program is designed to take officers who have experience operating ships and submarines and get them the technical foundation they need to be technical leaders in the Navy,” says 2N Professor of the Practice Andrew Gillespy, who graduated from the program himself in 2008. “We’re building the next generation of ship and submarine designers for the U.S. Navy.”
The MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program also enrolls naval officers, in its dedicated master’s program in oceanography and applied ocean science and engineering, where they work on Navy-related research ranging from autonomous vehicles to applied ocean science, physical oceanography, and more. While the 2N program, which was founded back in 1901, has been around a lot longer than the MIT-WHOI Program, naval officers were among the first graduates of MIT-WHOI in 1970.
“The Navy’s been with us from the beginning,” WHOI Senior Scientist Ann Tarrant says. “MIT’s various naval offerings really show the strong link between the institutions. It shows MIT’s commitment to doing research that is valuable to our nation’s security, and the high esteem the Navy places on MIT more broadly.”
At MIT, both the 2N and MIT-WHOI programs are housed within the Department of Mechanical Engineering; MIT-WHOI, which also offers a doctoral program, is jointly hosted by the Department for Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Still, the programs engage students and faculty from across the Institute.
“Our students work with pretty much every professor who touches ocean engineering,” Gillespy says. “One of the great parts about our program is the ability for the students to do one-on-one thesis work with the best professors in the world here at MIT. That is something that the Navy really, values.”
A century of training naval leaders
MIT was one of the first educational institutions to include oceanography in its curriculum and has played a leading role in advancing the discipline. The Department of Mechanical Engineering first offered a program in marine engineering and naval architecture in 1886, which led to the Department of Naval Architecture.
The program has changed names several times since then, but it can be mapped to today’s Center for Ocean Engineering, which continues to support the Navy and MIT’s naval programs through its research.
The 2N program was founded in 1901 and has been taught by active-duty faculty members for close to a century. Students in the program, who also include members of the U.S. Coast Guard as well as foreign naval officers, jump back into academia with two years of classes followed by an industry-sponsored design project.
“The program gives you a solid foundation in naval engineering and the leeway to study what’s interesting to you; this way you can bring new research back to the fleet,” says Adam Jay Pressel, who’s entering his third and final year in the 2N program. “Being a full-time graduate student and naval officer at one of the best universities in the world is probably the best job I’ll ever have.”
Gillespy notes that while the requirements for most MIT master’s students is 72 credits plus a thesis, 2N graduates earn around 300 credits over their three years.
The reason for the high course load is that 2N graduates get two master’s degrees, and the 2N Naval Engineer’s degree is earned by meeting both MIT and the Navy’s requirements.
“We encourage them to get the second degree in an area they’re interested in and really want to pursue,” Gillespy says. “We’ve had students working in electrical engineering on power systems, in mechanical engineering, and system design and management, which is the joint program with the business school and the engineering program. That program is great because we’re not just engineers. In the future, our students are going to be technical leaders, so getting that leadership and management expertise from the business school is great. But you probably can’t pick a course at MIT that we haven’t had somebody get a second degree in.”
The MIT-WHOI master’s program is usually a little over two years long and features coursework at WHOI and MIT followed by a master’s thesis. Naval students have worked on topics like ocean circulation, autonomous vehicles, and meteorology.
“Having naval officers really benefits our whole student body and program,” Tarrant says. “They have a lot of extremely valuable real-world experience, and they help us understand how the research we’re doing can make an impact in the Navy and on the world.”
Tarrant notes that many faculty members and researchers at both MIT and WHOI work on projects funded by the Navy, and naval officers bring valuable perspectives to that work.
“It helps us align the work we do with the Navy’s mission,” Tarrant says. “WHOI and MIT more broadly have a long-standing relationship with the Navy that really helps us.”
MIT leaves its mark
Naval officers’ work at MIT has gone on to make a huge impact on the Navy. Several students’ ship design and conversion projects from the 2N program have gone on to become actual ships the Navy builds. In 2019, 2N students worked on converting a massive destroyer called the DDG 1000 to accommodate hypersonic missiles. The students concept design showed it was feasible, and the Navy is actively overseeing that conversion now.
The graduates themselves have also gone on to assume leadership roles at every level of the Navy. The current program manager for a major Navy initiative designing a new class of submarines is 2N graduate Admiral Pete Small ’05, SM ’05, who previously taught as a professor of the practice at MIT.
“Our program has a really proud history of producing officers that are great leaders and have the technical foundation to lead highly advanced programs,” Gillespy says.
Gillespy says his own experience in the Navy has underscored the value of the 2N program. He and several other graduates of the program were responsible for designing the Columbia-class submarine, which is scheduled to go into service in 2031.
“Every day when we were designing the Columbia class submarine, we had the world’s experts in a particular area come in and present their design thoughts and what they’re working on, and being able to have intelligent conversations and push the program forward across all the disciplines was critical,” Gillespy says. “There wasn’t a course that I took here that I couldn’t trace back to a discipline that I was working on. My fellow officers echoed the sentiment of how well MIT prepared us to do submarine design.”
