Portsmouth High Students Spend Summer Working at NUWC

Members and staff from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation will visit the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport today to observe students at work in the Undersea Technology Apprentice Program (UTAP).   

UTAP is a paid summer program that allows high school students to focus their studies on electrical engineering and physics, especially buoyancy and hydrodynamics.

The program provides an engineering design lab experience during which the students build and re-engineer an underwater vehicle and then test it against each other’s designs. This year’s UTAP problem scenario focuses on location and retrieval operations.

NUWC Newport offered two sessions of UTAP this summer to 44 high school students from NUWC Newport’s partner schools in Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth, and New Bedford, MA. 

The current session includes 20 students from Portsmouth and Middletown High Schools. 

The session is presented through an educational partnership agreement  between NUWC Newport and the Undersea Science and Engineering Foundation, Inc. (USEF), and made possible thanks to a grant from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation. 

During Monday’s visit, representatives of the van Beuren Charitable Foundation will have an opportunity to view the vehicles students have built and talk to program participants. Foundation board members Archbold van Beuren, Hope van Beuren, Barbara van Beuren, and Stephen Glascock are expected to attend, as well as Executive Director Elizabeth Lynn and Program Officer Deborah Linnell. 

The majority of the UTAP program takes place at NUWC Newport’s Education Outreach Center. USEF has provided volunteers to mentor the students and administer the program.