Geography BA (Hons)

University of Oxford

Geography provides a diverse interdisciplinary degree that bridges the natural and social sciences, providing enhancement of a broad range of transferable skills, and an education encompassing pressing issues at a range of scales, from local up to global. The degree spans such key topics as climate and environmental change, inequality, social, economic and cultural transformation, biodiversity loss, geomorphological processes in drylands, geographical data science, post-colonialism and globalization.

The Oxford Geography degree provides a holistic view of the workings of physical and human environments, the ways in which humans are transforming the world and the implications for human societies. Students are introduced to the full range of geographical topics in the foundational courses, which they can then follow up in more detail in the optional papers, shaping their programme to match their developing interests. There is emphasis placed on interdisciplinary approaches within the course, with opportunities to explore the intersections between geography and other disciplines from the humanities, social and natural sciences.

The facilities available at Oxford are among the best in the country. Field equipment used by students for fieldwork reports and dissertations include Lidar systems for remote sensing of winds, theodolites for tracking balloons to calculate winds in the lower atmosphere, a high specification computing cluster which allows students to access data from the latest climate change experiments, as well as satellite-derived data of clouds and pollution. The department also has well-equipped Geolabs for practical physical courses and individual research projects including the Geography Research and Teaching Labs, the Oxford Luminescence Dating Lab and the Oxford Rock Breakdown Lab. The central and collegiate Library resources, electronically and in print are second to none.

Careers

The broad set of transferable skills means Geography graduates have a wide range of career opportunities. In recent years graduates have proceeded to employment in environmental policy, climate science, communications and media, charities and NGOs including the United Nations, management consultancy, government and politics, conservation and heritage management, the law, banking, finance, teaching, research, and much more.

Karoline, a Migration Policy Officer, says: ‘“Thinking geographically” is still very much part of my work: migration is a matter which can only be properly understood from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Not only is it useful that I was as used to reading studies about migration dynamics as I was to understanding the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… the very Oxfordian skill to be able to turn out concise written work in super-short timeframes is trained and tested on nearly a daily basis!’