Eleven transportation students from Cal State Dominguez Hills, Occidental College, UC Irvine, and USC participated as student volunteers at the FuturePorts Annual Conference, assisting with registration and check-in, materials distribution, tech setup, and audience engagement. Each year FuturePorts offers a limited number of complimentary spaces at the conference to students who enlist as morning or afternoon volunteers.

Each year, FuturePorts convenes logistics, planning, and workforce representatives in Long Beach for a day long industry innovation forum dedicated to finding solutions for planning issues related to the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. This year’s conference took place at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach on June 23, 2016.

The morning sessions began with briefings on important ongoing projects at the two ports, including the Ports O’ Call Redevelopment and the Gerald Desmond Bridge replacement project, followed by panels on achieving ‘mega-ship’ compatibility, meeting sustainable growth thresholds, and forging political partnerships. Student volunteers remarked how surprisingly dynamic and political these panels were. With some emergent issues such as automated ship unloading facilities replacing manned facilities, the speakers shared that consensus still needs to be forged within the industry on how to best strike political balance.

A common sub-topic among many of the presentations and panels was the Panama Canal expansion, planned to officially open in Panama merely three days later on June 26. Experts traded predictions of how the upcoming expansion might affect business for the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

After the conclusion of their shifts, all eleven students commented that they were grateful for the experience. Many left having established many new professional contacts, and all recommended other students take advantage of the same opportunity at FuturePorts’ conference next year.

METRANS Assistant Director, Victoria Deguzman, coordinates students’ attendance at this FuturePorts event. Students interested in volunteering at similar transportation- and logistics-related events are encouraged to sign up to receive the weekly METRANS Student Weekly News & Events newsletter by contacting our newsletter editor Kaitlyn Zhang ([email protected]).

Griffin Kantz

Kantz is a third-year undergraduate studying sustainable planning in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].