Environmental geography is a subfield in geography that explores human-environment interactions. The B.S. in Environmental Geography provides students with the opportunity to study how humans impact, manage, and conserve the natural environment, including landforms, water and soil resources, climate, and plant and animal communities. Courses in the program focus on understanding processes and patterns in the natural environment, as well as quantitative analysis and applied, hands-on experiences in the classroom and in the field.
The geography major provides students with a solid foundation of the discipline. Students can take a variety of courses to experience breadth in the field, or they can focus on a subfield in geography to gain depth.
The department also offers a minor in geography.
Our Urban and Regional Planning B.S. is the only undergraduate planning degree program in the SUNY system. The program emphasizes technical skills and it is applied in nature. Many of the courses are taught by professional planners currently employed by local planning agencies. Graduates are prepared for positions in planners in their area of expertise, which may range from land use to transportation planning.
The department also offers a minor in urban and regional planning.
The GIS (geographic information systems) minor allows students to gain the depth of knowledge needed for many of the jobs available today requiring spatial analysis skills and geographic data processing capabilities.
The meteorology and climatology minor may add a useful dimension to the student’s major (e.g., a communications major positioning themselves to work as a broadcast meteorologist, or a chemistry major interested in the implications of weather on air quality, or a psychology/health and wellness major acquiring the needed background to understand the role of weather on our mental and physical health), positioning a student for a possible alternative career option, or taken simply because the student has an interest in weather and climate.
The College's Great Lakes Center offers two interdisciplinary master's programs in Great Lakes ecosystem science. Both programs share certain required and elective courses, but they differ in their objectives. The master of science program is designed to prepare its graduates for management positions in the environmental sciences; the master of arts program prepares graduates for research positions or academic careers.
