Geosciences

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.

Curriculum

Degree Offerings and Requirements (UVM Catalogue):

• Geosciences B.A.
• Geosciences B.S.
• Geosciences Minor
• Geospatial Technologies Minor

Outcomes

Graduates with a geosciences degree are well prepared for an ever-changing job market as we emphasize disciplinary and transferable skills:

• Make inferences about complex systems from observations of the natural world combined with experimentation and modeling.
• Solve problems requiring spatial and temporal interpretations.
• Work with uncertainty, non-uniqueness, incompleteness, ambiguity, and indirect observations.
• Integrate data from different disciplines, apply systems thinking, and are technologically versatile.
• Apply a field- and data-based, hypothesis-driven approach to environmental challenges.
• Communicate evaluation of scientific information orally and in writing to various audiences.

The University of Vermont is a national leader in the study of the environment, and the interdisciplinary geosciences program is an important part of it. Environmental sciences, environmental studies, and geosciences are all interdisciplinary programs that apply a systems lens to the environment. So what is different? geosciences focuses on the interconnectedness of all earth’s layers and contributes knowledge and skills across larger timescales and greater depths on Earth, as well as other planetary bodies. Geosciences is exclusively offered through the College of Arts and Sciences. To learn more, check our frequently asked questions.

Careers

• Cartographer
• Environmental law
• Climatologist
• Emergency management
• Geographical information systems officer
• Hydrologist
• Professor, higher education
• Remote sensing analyst
• Surveyor
• Urban/town planner
• Public policy

Where Alumni Work

• Associates in Rural Development
• Burlington Housing Authority
• Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission
• Environmental Protection Agency
• The Nature Conservancy
• National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
• National Geographic Society
• National Imagery and Mapping Agency
• National Weather Service
• Senate Internship Program
• State of Vermont
• U.S. Forest Service
• Vermont Public Radio

Graduate Schools

• Cambridge University
• Miami University
• New Mexico
• Utah University
• University of Maine
• Yale