You can't predict what you might discover in Geo lab.

Students atop a volcano in Mexico.

Coastal research in North Carolina.

10. Free food!
Weekly departmental lunches for students, faculty and staff, barbecues at a professor's house twice a year, dinners out with visiting speakers (free food and career contacts!), holiday parties, the Mineral Curator's famous brownies... Want the details? See our listing of events.

9. Play in the dirt. Get credit for it.
Almost all of our geology courses have one field trip and some have several. They are a great way to experience "real" geology, to do some hands-on learning, and to get out of the library and into the sun!

8. Call your profs by their first names.
The BMC geology department is famous for its congeniality. Geology majors and professors are on a first-name basis, and the department's small size guarantees small class size, lots of individual attention, and easy access to labs, equipment, and opportunities.

7. Work Study jobs...
...it's better than working in Dining Services! Jobs are available in mineral curation, rock sample preparation (whack 'em, cut 'em, and crush 'em), database management, sediment and geochem analysis, map curation, and teaching assistantships. More fun than Dining Services, and it looks great on your resume.

6. Summer fun.
There are great opportunities for internships, student-faculty collaborative research, and field schools. Recent BMC geology majors have done summer work in Alaska, Utah, North Carolina, Long Island, Florida, New Zealand, Montana, British Columbia, California, Wyoming and Georgia.

5. Research on the beach and in Rhoads Pond.
Geo majors can conduct research projects that take them to the New Jersey shore and other beaches year-round, and to the newly created pond on campus.

4. Natural disasters.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods. Need we say more?

3. Award winning faculty.
Many of the members of our faculty have received distinguished awards and are highly regarded in their specialized fields. Read about one of them here.

2. Cool rocks (of course)!
The department owns the largest mineral collection for a college its size, as well as extensive collections of rocks from around the world. Students have access to the collections for classwork and research. Some of the samples can be seen lining the halls of the PSB.

1. Mountains, oceans, glaciers, deserts, dinosaurs, plate tectonics, maps, global warming, nuclear waste, acid rain, water pollution, environmental policy, precious gems, satellite imaging...

For more information, ask any geo major, or talk to a major representative, the major advisor, or any of the geology faculty.