Resource Conservation or Parks, Tourism, and Recreation Management?

College Majors
1

I’m currently a junior pursuing a B.A. in Media Arts. I want to work for a brewery, winery, or distillery and decided on Media Arts because I thought it would be good for social media and/or marketing.

I really want to get into the production end, however, and need a science degree in order to get into the master’s program at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland for Brewing and Distilling. I started out in Resource Conservation and have about half of the coursework done but switched because it the courses I took were about forestry and I wasn’t interested in forestry.

Resource Conservation allows you to design your own degree so I could design it towards horticulture but PTRM sounds good too because it teaches you both business and resource management and alcohol seems like a tourism industry. Most of the classes are the same for both majors so I’m about halfway done with both majors.

I also thought that if I didn’t get into Heriot-Watt then I could go to grad school for Horticulture and could be a sustainability officer for a brewery, winery, or distillery. I know chemistry or something would be better but it would take to long to earn a chemistry degree and right now I have a bunch of wasted credits from my Resource Conservation major.

Which would be better, Resource Conservation and design a science degree, or PTRM to learn business, management, and science?

2

AS with most companies, wineries/breweries/distilleries/beverage companies hire people with a variety of backgrounds. The biggest ones are going to have HR personnel, graphic designers, marketing, accounting/finance, legal, etc. I have a friend with a PhD in political science and public health who is the director of global public health programs at a major beer company (think Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, Heineken, etc.)

The short facts are this:

  1. If you take a look at brewer/brewmaster job listings, virtually none of them ask for a specific degree in brewing or even chem…what they really want is someone who has brewing experience. And if you read profiles of brewers who got their jobs in the U.S., most of them seem to have fallen into it after working in a brewery or pub for a few years learning the business. So I think it matters less what degree you get and more that you try to get an apprenticeship or part-time job somewhere you can learn to brew.

  2. Only the largest companies are going to be hiring sustainability officers. However, even smaller companies will need business managers, so I’d say that the PTRM major is probably better for your goals.