Academic Year:
Telephone: (302) 831-2294
http://www.udel.edu/Geography
Faculty Listing: http://www.udel.edu/Geography/faculty.html
Program Overview
The department offers programs leading to the Master of Arts, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Geography. The graduate program provides the opportunity for students to interact frequently with a staff whose interests touch upon one of three themes: climatology, land-surface processes, and human geography.
The climatology program emphasizes physical, synoptic, dynamic, and water budget climatology. The land-surface processes emphasis includes work on geomorphology, periglacial landforms, permafrost, and flows of water and trace chemicals through the biota and the soil.
The human geography program covers a broad range of themes approached from cultural-historical, socio-economic and humanistic perspectives. All three subareas intersect for work in such areas as sea-ice dynamics and monitoring, glaciology, landscape evidence of climatic change, human influences on climate, climate and human health, and human interactions with the physical landscape. Interdisciplinary work with other departments and colleges is encouraged.
Research Centers
The department houses the University's Center for Climatic Research and the Office of the State Climatologist for Delaware. Facilities include laboratories for cartography, microclimatology, biogeography, geographic information science and computer analysis. The department is well-equipped with microclimatic and other fieldwork instrumentation and workstations and related peripherals for GIS and remote sensing work. The department also maintains high-end UNIX servers for modeling and data analysis, good connections to university-wide computing resources, and connections to SURA-Grid for supercomputing needs.
Requirements For Admission
General admissions requirements are an undergraduate index of 2.75 or more and combined GRE scores of at least 1050. Admission is selective and competitive based on the number of well qualified applicants and the limits of available faculty and facilities. Those who meet stated minimum academic requirements are not guaranteed admission, nor are those who fail to meet those requirements necessarily precluded from admission if they offer other appropriate strengths. The department will consider qualified applicants without previous background in geography, although additional preliminary work may be required.
Financial Aid
Teaching assistantships, research assistantships and University fellowships are available to graduate students at the MA, MS, and PhD levels. In addition, this department regularly assists students in finding fellowships via outside programs, such as NASA or American Meteorological Society fellowships. Please refer to Graduate Fellowships and Assistantships for additional information.
Requirements For The Master's Degrees
Students in either master's program complete (with a B average or better) a total of 24 course credits as well as a thesis (6 credits). In general, students in the human geography area will work toward the Master of Arts degree, while climatology and land-surface processes students will pursue the Master of Science. Course work programs are tailored to the student's research interest, and each student's work is periodically reviewed. There is no special examination or language requirement.
It is the responsibility of the student in consultation with the thesis adviser to complete the thesis and to obtain acceptance by the thesis committee. A public presentation of the thesis to the department also is required.
Requirements For The PhD Degree
Applicants to the PhD program concentrations in Climatology or Land-Surface Processes are expected to have completed a master's degree in geography, geology, climatology, meteorology, or another related discipline. Students in these concentrations must also have completed mathematics through ordinary differential equations and must demonstrate a knowledge of at least one higher level computer programming language. PhD students are expected to obtain an in-depth knowledge of two areas. One of these must be topical, such as bioclimatology, physical climatology and land-surface processes urban climatology, or climate dynamics for the Climatology concentration, or land-surface measurement, surface process analysis, biogeochemistry, or geomorphology for the Land-Surface Processes concentration. The other area must be methodological such as statistical methods, mathematical modeling, or geographic information science..
Students are also expected to demonstrate a high level of professional competence by passing a written qualifying examination, an oral examination and an oral dissertation defense. More description of the PhD program can be obtained by contacting the Geography Department.
Although every effort has been made to assure the accuracy of the information in the Catalog,
students and others who use the Catalog should note that the policies, rules, regulations,
requirements for graduation, course offerings, and other materials reproduced in the Catalog change
from time-to-time and that these changes may alter the information contained in this Catalog.
see Legal Statement
