Michigan Engineering News
Michigan partners with Fincantieri, a leading shipbuilding company, to give hands-on, cross-cultural training to future naval architects. Interns share their experience.
As the United States seeks to ramp up its shipbuilding, the University of Michigan is partnering with Fincantieri, one of the western hemisphere’s largest shipbuilding companies, to provide hands-on training to the next generation of naval architects.
Four U-M naval architecture and marine engineering undergraduates comprised the first cohort of the Real World Experiences program, an eight-week summer internship at one of Fincantieri’s naval vessel division offices in Genoa, Italy. The program is exclusive to U-M students, but a twin exchange program is open to students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both programs were envisioned and coordinated by Gabriele Librandi, Director of Research & Innovation at Fincantieri Marine Group. Fincantieri is currently considering to extend these programs to future U-M cohorts.
Fincantieri is teaming up with universities to ensure the U.S. has the engineers needed to support the goals of the bipartisan SHIPs for America Act, a bill re-introduced to Congress on April 30, 2025. U-M students can supplement their education with hands-on experience at Fincantieri’s 18 shipyards across four continents, including three in the U.S., while the company gains access to emerging talent.
“We are deeply committed to fostering the next generation of naval architects and marine engineers,” said Cengiz Atam, the Vice President of Engineering at Fincantieri Marine Group. “We have a longstanding relationship with the University of Michigan, and we see their talented students as a vital part of our future. We believe in investing in their development and helping them build successful, fulfilling futures—right alongside our own success as a company.”
The company has a track record of taking on ambitious projects that could provide unique student experiences. Notable ships recently built by Fincantieri include: ITS Cavour, the Italian Navy’s flagship; the Progress, the largest tanker that can carry liquid-natural gas between U.S. ports; the Sun Princess, which runs on liquid-natural gas and is the largest ship owned by Princess Cruises; and the Viking Venus, ranked the fourth best cruise ship by the U.S. News & World Report. The company also plans to complete three cruise ships that run on carbon-neutral and zero-emission fuels for Explora Journeys, a Swiss luxury cruise line, by 2028.
In addition to working on real ship-design projects, the four students in the Real World Experiences program—Grace Gargiulo, John McCalmont, Lyn Tran, and William Engemann—took naval architecture and ship construction classes at the University of Genoa. They also visited Fincantieri’s Muggiano shipyard, which conducts the final outfitting phases and pre-delivery trials for mega yachts and Italian Navy warships. After their internship in Italy, some of the students visited Fincantieri’s shipyard in Marinette, Wis., which builds warships for the U.S. Navy and vessels for the U.S. Coast Guard.
Meanwhile, Archita Saraiya, a junior in naval architecture and marine engineering and mechanical engineering, interned for three months at Fincantieri’s Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. The 63-acre facility builds commercial vessels, as well as ships for the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Michigan Engineering sat down with Engemann, McCalmont, Saraiya and Tran to learn about how their internships helped them develop core competencies essential to a career in engineering, such as communication, global perspective, teamwork, systems thinking, lifelong learning and risk taking. Below is a collection of selected responses:
McCalmont: Getting that experience working with people from other countries in an international industry was a unique opportunity. A lot more shipbuilding gets done in Europe and Asia than in the U.S. right now, and ships are meant to travel around the world, so you have to be comfortable interacting with people in the rest of the world.
Tran: I had interned at a small design firm in Houston, Texas, with only 15 employees. So transitioning to a large design firm working on projects for multiple nations’ militaries helped me think about where I would want to work when I graduate.
Saraiya: I was mainly helping with a vessel that was designed to help repair offshore wind turbines. Typically, I would either work on an engineering drawing, or look at a model of the ship, or sometimes the real ship, and check that the valves and pipes were ordered and installed like we had specified. If the pipes hadn’t been installed, we would have to note it and make sure that, when they put the flooring in, they don’t pour concrete where there should be holes for the pipes. It’s really cool to be on the real ship because you get to see the impacts of your work within a couple of days.
McCalmont: When I was there, they were in the final stages of a basic, pre-contractual design for an Italian Navy ship. I could see all the requirements and then all the solutions the engineers built out and integrated into a platform that checks all the boxes.
We also traveled to the University of Genoa, which has a naval architecture department, where we had a series of lectures from professors on the work they were doing at the time. It was cool because we got to see a lot of new methods on how to use the power of computing to find innovative solutions to things like propeller design, or ship design, to make things lighter and more efficient.
Engemann: I went through a rotation of five different departments, and I spent a lot of time working with their propulsion department and outfitting department. One common thread with all of them is the business side of the whole thing. You can’t make every single thing that goes into a ship in-house. You have to buy firefighting systems, fuel systems, and all the different furnishings. You have to coordinate these things and make sure they’re up to spec.
Tran: I had three specific projects. I read technical specifications for a bunch of vessels that Fincantieri was working on, and it helped me solidify some of my technical skills and brush up on Italian. The second project involved doing weight and center of gravity estimates for a couple of their vessels, and the third was doing duct analytics and back-pressure calculations for the same vessels. HVAC is pretty important to the entire system of a ship—it’s how your engine gets intake, how you have ventilation and clean air, especially below the waterline. Those calculations have to be correct, because you need to size specific machinery to your airflow requirements.
Saraiya: The most surprising thing for me was probably how actively the drawings and ship design change, even during construction. One ship they are constructing right now is in its last stages, but they’re still updating drawings and creating new changes to the boat. I think it made me realize that working in shipbuilding requires a level of adaptability. You’re working on a new thing every week and you need to handle the changes.
Engemann: What surprised me most was the flexibility and ambiguity. In our design space, there’s never a single optimal solution. In preliminary design, you can’t spend all this time getting bogged down in numbers. There can be maybe 100 to 200 answers that will work, and none of them are the best. It’s hard to be okay with knowing that you don’t have a perfect answer, and I think it takes experience to know that that’s not going to hurt anything.
Saraiya: I worked with people involved in all the different systems on the ship, and I didn’t expect to work with the electrical engineers there. Because I’m not in electrical engineering, I learned a lot that wouldn’t have otherwise. For me, the most important lesson was that there is no question that is too dumb. I’ve never done electrical work, and even though it was kind of scary, I had to be able to advocate for myself whenever I didn’t understand something, and find the person who did.
McCalmont: When you’re working on the computer, the ship is just wireframes on a black background. But when you see the real warship, you can visit bunks, wardrooms, and painting on the walls, and it drives home that this is a real, lived-in space. Doing the best you can, and making sure that you don’t cut corners, can save lives down the road.
Tran: Probably how to work with others, particularly how to balance working with peers versus people higher in the company structure. I had to learn how to navigate what questions I could figure out myself, versus when things need to be brought to our supervisor or mentor. If you take too long because you don’t know how to ask for help, that can cost the company.