Marine Biology is the largest program at Northmoor and the one most people mean when they write to ask about studying the ocean. It is a full biology degree taught in a marine setting: cells, genetics, evolution and ecology, with the organisms and the water they live in supplying the examples throughout.
You will be in the field in your first year. Students in this program spend nights at Prentice Coastal Field Station from the first spring, walking transects that have been surveyed continuously since 2004, and the courses that involve the most cold water fill first every year.
What you study
The first two years build the core: introductory marine biology, general oceanography, environmental science foundations, and invertebrate zoology. The third and fourth years open out into fish biology, marine botany, reef ecology and molecular ecology, with room for courses from the aquaculture and policy programs.
The molecular strand is worth flagging because it is where the field is moving. Environmental DNA lets a liter of seawater stand in for a survey, and learning both what that delivers and where it quietly fails is a genuinely marketable thing to be able to do.
Where it leads
Graduates go into environmental consulting, state and federal agency science, aquaculture, education, and graduate study. The last is the largest single destination, and it is worth being direct about why.
Several specializations at Northmoor are graduate programs, not undergraduate ones. Marine mammal science is the clearest case. If that is what you want to do, this degree is the route: it gives you the population biology and statistics that the master's program assumes you already have. Students who arrive wanting marine mammals and leave four years later doing exactly that are a normal outcome, not a redirection.
What to expect
Cold water and early starts. Tide work does not respect a timetable, and a good deal of the field schedule is set by the moon rather than by the registrar. Students who come to visit in February tend to know what they are signing up for.