Spending days at sea on research ships in the Gulf of Mexico may not be how typical Aggie undergraduate students spend their time in between classes, but for junior Victoria Scriven, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. That’s because Scriven is one of the first students in the oceanography undergraduate degree program at Texas A&M University.
Fall 2017 was the inaugural semester of the Texas A&M Department of Oceanography’s undergraduate program, and the pioneering students have gotten to take advantage of unique hands-on research opportunities and faculty mentoring.
“Being able to know my professors by their first name, being able to sit on a boat with them and talk to them about my future, and where they think I should go has been very beneficial to me,” Scriven said. “The community lets me get to know the people that will help me in my future.”
The degree program provides hands-on experience that will be valuable to each students’ futures.
“I’ve been on two boats this semester, both in response to Hurricane Harvey,” said Scriven. “I also got to do research with IODP (the International Ocean Discovery Program), which is the more geological side of oceanography, after my freshmen year, and then I went to Peru this summer. Being on the boats this semester opened my eyes to the fact that I want to be in operational oceanography.”
For high school students considering majoring in oceanography, Scriven said “just go for it.”
Get more information on the oceanography degree program.
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Media contact: Leslie Lee, Communications Coordinator, College of Geosciences, (979) 845-0910, leslielee@tamu.edu.
