<p>What are some well respected Geology Programs?</p>
<p>MIT, Brown…</p>
<p>Applied or more theoretical? Colorado School of Mines is fantastic for applied geoscience.</p>
<p>It depends what you’re wanting to do with geology. If you mean petroleum engineering which is probably the most common career application for geology-related degrees, that’s different than if you just want to predict earthquakes and study rocks and stuff.</p>
<p>University of Oklahoma, University of Calgary, University of Tulsa, Southern Methodist University are all really good for geology.</p>
<p>osu, Im just looking for well respected programs, I’m not quite sure yet about career specifics but I know geology is a good place to start. </p>
<p>Thanks for the responses but feel free to post many schools so I can narrow down my choices by if I could even get in lol</p>
<p>According to USNWR, the rankings for geology are as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Cal Tech</li>
<li>Penn State</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>Texas</li>
<li>Arizona</li>
<li>UC-Berkeley</li>
<li>Wisconsin</li>
<li>Washington</li>
</ol>
<p>I hope this helps. Before someone says it, yes these are graduate school rankings. I know of no readily available rankings for geology at the undergraduate level. I would assume the top schools would be similar.</p>
<p>My sister is a geology major at Middlebury college and loves the department. Of course it doesn’t have as much resources as some larger public schools but it is good for undergrad LAC wise. I know UTexas as a good geo program (my sis is working on some of their collection this summer) but I believe it is quite small.</p>
<p>Gourman undergraduate ranking for geology/geoscience</p>
<p>Caltech
MIT
Princeton
Columbia
Stanford
Harvard
U Chicago
UCLA
Yale
UC Berkeley
Cornell
Penn State UP
U Texas Austin
U Wisconsin Madison
U Arizona
UC Santa Barbara
Brown
Virginia Tech
SUNY Stony Brook
U Michigan Ann Arbor
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern
U Washington
Indiana U Bloomington
U Minnesota
UC Davis
U Colorado Boulder
U Illinois Champaign-Urbana
USC
Arizona State
UC Santa Cruz
U Miami
U Utah
U Mass Amherst
UNC Chapel Hill
U Oregon
Texas A&M
SUNY Albany
Ohio State
U Kansas
U South Carolina Columbia
U Wyoming
U Cincinnati
U New Mexico
Rice
U Iowa
Louisiana State
Oregon State Columbus
U Hawaii Manoa
Michigan State</p>
<p>So when choosing a college for myself, should the prospective university’s ranking in my desired major outweigh its overall ranking?</p>
<p>For example colorado is not overly prestigious on the whole, but apparently the geology program is well respected. So what matters more???</p>
<p>any answers to the above question? ^^^^</p>
<p>Depends on how sure you are with what you want to do both at college and beyond.</p>
<p>Also, like other poster’s eluded to, what kind of geology you want to do matters a lot. Wouldn’t go to Brown for petro, but would for planetary, for instance.</p>
<p>It seems unwise for me to specialize so much at age 17 especially with the number of times most people change majors… But then again I do need to decide on a college so what should I do?</p>
<p>When companies hire geologists do they look more for extremely specialized backgrounds such as geomorphologists, petrologists, stratigraphers, mineralogists etc. to suit their specific need or would it be better for me to get a general geology background so I would be marketable to more employers where I could later specialize further?</p>
<p>
No. Most top universities have solid earth science departments, and job outlooks are quite good for geology graduates from any university.</p>
<p>I disagree with modest in that you need to worry about your specialty at this point. Sure, Chicago and UT Austin are great for vertebrate paleontology – but really, the undergraduate geo education you get there won’t be a lot different than one you’d get at Northwestern or Cornell. What you can do to increase employability is take useful courses on in-demand topics like GIS and hydrogeology.</p>
<p>Search for past posts by a poster named Ophiolite – her posts are quite helpful for those interested in geology. She did her undergrad at Pitt and ended up at Wisconsin for grad school, a top 10 program.</p>
<p>
[quote=]
I know UTexas as a good geo program (my sis is working on some of their collection this summer) but I believe it is quite small.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don’t think UTexas’s program is that small… a former student recently gave ~$230M solely to the Geology program so they split it off from the College of Natural Science and made it an entirely new College within the University.</p>
<p>Well, IB, I wasn’t very clear I think in my last post. I don’t think you should even worry about concentration as an incoming undergrad-- too many people change their mind and too many schools offer strong enough, similar enough programs that it should be a major concern. However, I do think there are an exceptionally few number of people who are very sure of what they want to do and if that’s the case, by all means, look at what you want to do and choose based on that.</p>
<p>I guess my second comment was more about the fact that overall rankings in geology are misleading because many of the schools listed in the middle (as is often the case) may be significantly better in some areas of geology but not as well ranked overall because of the smaller size (sometimes a huge advantage to undergrads, imo).</p>
<p>Overall, I wouldn’t worry about geology pretty much at all and I would just look at top schools to get into. As with most sciences, geology is so interdisciplinary and its fundamentals are so well established that most any strong school will prepare you for work or grad school.</p>
<p>UT’s geology school houses its own library and its own institutes…that’s got to be worth something.</p>
<p>UT sounds good since I live in texas.</p>
<p>Does anyone know how the programs at Colorado College, University of British Columbia, and University of Miami are?</p>
<p>The strongest geology LACs tend to belong to the [url=<a href=“http://keckgeology.org/]Keck”>http://keckgeology.org/]Keck</a> Geology Consortium<a href=“although%20there%20are%20also%20good%20schools%20that%20are%20not%20members”>/url</a></p>
<p>when I said UT Geology program is small I meant about the number of students that major in it, not the resources</p>
<p>Wisconsin has a good mid-sized Geology dept. It has its own building and library.</p>
<p>[Geology</a> and Geophysics, UW-Madison](<a href=“http://www.geology.wisc.edu/home.html]Geology”>Department of Geoscience – Exploring fundamental questions about Earth, life, and the environment – UW–Madison)</p>