Program Overview
The geosciences program offers perspectives of timescales across all Earth layers to investigate pressing environmental challenges. Geoscience students focus on understanding the interconnectedness of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere, investigate the past, understand and measure the present, and make predictions about the future behavior of our planet and other planetary bodies. The College of Arts and Sciences offers Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Sciences degrees in geosciences as well as a minor.
Students enjoy flexibility and interdisciplinarity with offerings within our department and other disciplines. This includes courses on weather, climate, vegetation dynamics, materials and hazards of Earth and other planetary bodies, sustainability, natural waters, contamination, lab and field methods, and much more.
Structure and flexibility
All majors and minors take foundational courses in the breadth of geosciences. At the intermediate and advanced levels, students take courses in several categories (also called subfields):
- Earth and planetary materials
- Land-surface processes and interactions
- Atmospheric and climatological processes
- Practice requirement
Many of our courses are interdisciplinary and contain practice elements, thus it is not very difficult to satisfy each of the categories. After that, students can either continue exploring the breadth of the discipline with courses from multiple categories or specialize.
Students also have ample flexibility through choice of elective courses that can come from across UVM and choices in ancillary courses. See the undergraduate catalogue to learn more.