Geology Opportunities - Anything That Involves the Study of the Earth: Video Transcript

Laura Walkup [Geology graduate student]: As someone who is getting ready to graduate here coming up, I've been thinking a lot lately about what am I going to do next? Whether I'm going to go on and get a PhD or go get a job. And, in geology, I have opportunities either way. I can go get a PhD in any number of subsets of geology or there are a lot of jobs that one can get in geology with just a bachelor's degree or just a master's degree.

You can work for the Environmental Protection Agency, doing groundwater surveys, environmental things, looking at rock deposits seeing how those will store and transmit hazardous waste, things like that. You can get jobs with the US Geological Survey or a state geologic survey where you can be doing mapping things or looking at disaster hazard mitigation with earthquakes or volcanoes, landslides. So, there's a whole lot of different things you can do in geology.

You could also work for an oil or gas company finding energy resources. Recently there's also been a lot of energy companies that are devoting a lot of time and energy to alternate energy sources, things like geothermal energy, different sequestration type things, which are also very applicable to geologists. Anything pretty much that involves the study of the earth.

[December 2009]