Courses

  • Students in a geology course collaborate on a lesson

    Students utilize time in the classroom to explore the effects of erosion using software that simulates the results on real life land-forms.

  • Students load water samples in a laboratory

    Graduate students gain research experience by performing work in faculty laboratories.

  • Students in the field

    Students participate in field courses where they learn  and apply skills in a variety of unique environments. Here, Dr. Robb Gillespie leads his Geological Mapping course on an excursion in the U.P. to generate field observations and maps.

  • Students perform an expirement

    Students apply classroom training by performing hands-on laboratory experiments. Here, students create a landscape and observe what happens when water streams through it. They then modify the landscape to minimize the damage and repeat the process.

  • Students sit in a lecture hall

    Students attend lectures for courses like Historical Geology, Ocean Systems and Geology of National Parks and Monuments. Lectures are led by dynamic faculty and utilize a wide variety of technology to engage students and demonstrate complex topics.

Courses offered by the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Western Michigan University are designed to provide students with a comprehensive fundamental and applied understanding of the changing disciplines in geosciences. In particular, our science-based curriculum fulfills the industry and academic requirements for applied geosciences techniques for mapping, coring, sample curation, exploration and experimental geophysics, hydrogeological and geological modelling, geochemistry, hydrology and climate research as well as other disciplines that are of major scientific interest in the nation and abroad. We are constantly improving our educational and analytical facilities with new scientific technologies (e.g. Mass Spectrometer, Water Isotope Analyzer and other soil characterization methods) and new disciplines (e.g. planetary sciences, astrobiology and airborne geophysics).

Course listings

Note: Courses in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences utilize the prefix "GEOS".