The Empire State VII, a 530-foot, nine-deck training vessel, looms over the dock at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx, where the East River meets the Long Island Sound. It's being prepped for its annual summer teaching cruise, which will take cadets to Charleston, S.C., Málaga, Spain, and Belfast, Northern Ireland before returning to New York. Tom Murphy, SUNY Maritime College's Chief of Staff and a 1993 alumnus, has spent a lot of time on vessels at sea, but notes this one is different: "This is the first ship purposely built for training cadets. This isn't just a working ship, this is a school on water."

SUNY Maritime is one of six state-run maritime academies in the country, run like quasi-military academies where students wear uniforms, follow regimented schedules, and blend traditional engineering and seamanship coursework with Coast Guard-required licensing classes. Each student must complete three summer sea terms to accumulate 360 days of sea time required to sit for the license - a credential that can open the door to lucrative careers in a maritime industry currently facing a severe shortage of holders. Industry groups report roughly 8,000 open positions across the U.S. maritime sector, with more than 5,000 at the Military Sealift Command, the federal agency responsible for keeping Navy ships stocked with fuel, food, and ammunition in waters around the world. Without enough supply ships in the Persian Gulf, some Navy vessels near the Strait of Hormuz could exhaust their provisions in as few as five days. John Okon, SUNY Maritime's president and a retired U.S. Navy Admiral, puts it plainly: "The Navy does not have global reach, our national defense does not have global reach, without the logistical supply chain, which is our merchant marine."

The school asks a lot of its students - between 18 to 24 credits a semester, grinding through a course load cadets describe as a double major of traditional engineering or operations classes stacked on top of Coast Guard licensing coursework. "Our kids graduate highly educated, focused," Okon said. "When they graduate, their biggest problem is how are they going to manage all the money they're making and all the opportunities that they're going to have?" Starting salaries for entry-level officers are running well over $100,000, and the Military Sealift Command is offering signing bonuses of up to $54,000 for a three-year contract and starting salaries that can exceed $170,000. But those ships can sometimes operate for months at a stretch and venture into conflict zones - videos posted on social media showing missiles flying over the Persian Gulf illustrate the inherent risk of working alongside the Navy during the Iran war. Graduating senior Finn Mahan noted, "That also makes us heavy targets, because the enemy knows just as well how valuable and how important these supply ships are to our active-duty Navy vessels."

Faced with a shortage of merchant Marines, the Trump administration unveiled the Maritime Action Plan in February to grow the pipeline of licensed mariners. Admiral Okon framed the stakes: "Name something you went to purchase at a store, or that miraculously showed up through an Amazon truck. Just know that there is an army of mariners on the ships, moving those goods around the world." Maxwell Cappella, a recent SUNY Maritime graduate who spent four months as a third assistant engineer on a federal contract ship (he's not at liberty to discuss the ship's operations), managed the engine room with a crew of five. "We're like the heart of the ship," he said. The lure of a $50,000 signing bonus wasn't enough to draw him away from a shorter cruise, 24/7 internet access, and almost no expenses at sea - no drive to work, no cooking, no rent. The work below deck is the same regardless of a ship's purpose - 12 hours on, 12 hours off, 7 days a week without interruption, even on holidays. The Empire State VII will sail this summer with hundreds of cadets aboard, logging sea time toward their Coast Guard licenses, moving closer to the moment when they'll have to decide what kind of mariner they want to be, and where they're willing to go.