The discipline covers both the physical and social sciences. In the mid 1970s the department began to break up the general degree and the broad teaching of the discipline into subdivisions, special curricula with their own major codes, which focused upon the applied nature of geography. These tracks within the geography undergraduate degree reflect the different job opportunities which geographic education offers. The department now has six such tracks in addition to the geography major. There are no formal subdivisions or foci in the graduate program.
Graduate students choose courses and a thesis topic according to their own interests.
The department has a history of irregular assessment activities over the past ten years. We are now trying to regularize our assessment activities on an annual, formal basis as an independent activity by an assessment committee, under the general supervision of the department chair, and distinct from the annual newsletter upon which we based our assessment activities in the past. The general objective of the undergraduate program is to give all geography majors a broad knowledge of the physical and human-cultural properties of the world as well as an understanding of geographic techniques. An immediate goal of the undergraduate program is to equip students with sufficient geographic training so that they will be qualified for entry-level positions in professions which depend in part on the ability of a person to integrate spatial information, they will be qualified for admission to an advanced academic degree program, they will be qualified to research and analyze data so that they will be able to prepare and present sophisticated company and agency reports orally and in writing. Their goals are similar to the general goals of the undergraduate program stated above but modified to reflect the particular applied techniques and possible careers involved.