BS

Environmental Science at Northmoor is built around the coast, because that is where our expertise is and because a coastal setting supplies every problem the discipline cares about within an hour's drive. Water quality, contaminant transport, climate impact, habitat loss and the regulatory machinery that responds to all of it.

What You Study

The first year is foundations: environmental science, oceanography and earth systems, alongside chemistry and statistics. The second and third years move into water quality and pollution, estuarine systems, and climate change and coasts. The fourth year is dominated by environmental impact assessment, which is the closest thing the program has to a capstone and is taught as a professional skill rather than as a topic.

Because it draws on three departments, this program has more genuine breadth than any other degree here, and students should expect that the coherence is something they build rather than something the timetable provides. The estuary is the connecting thread. Almost every course uses the Aldwych system as its worked example, and by the fourth year students know that estuary in a way that turns out to be portable — the questions are the same everywhere, only the geometry changes, which is why graduates of this program are found working on systems that look nothing like this one but present exactly the same set of problems in a different arrangement, and why the department has never seen a reason to broaden the case study when depth in one place has proven more useful than shallow coverage of several.

Where It Leads

Environmental consulting is the largest destination, followed by state and federal agency work, nonprofit and advocacy roles, and graduate study. The impact assessment training is directly employable, and students who have done it well are hired on the strength of it.

What To Expect

Field and laboratory work throughout, a genuine statistics requirement, and a good deal of writing. Impact assessment is a writing discipline as much as a scientific one, and the program treats it that way.

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.

Marine Geoscience is about the solid part: the sediment on the seafloor, the structure beneath it, the shoreline that both produce, and the record of past climate held in the layering. It is the smallest of our undergraduate science programs, which means small classes and early access to equipment that at a larger institution would be reserved for graduate students.

What you study

Earth systems and introductory oceanography first, then sedimentology, coastal geomorphology, marine geophysics and paleoceanography. The sequence is deliberately arranged so that you learn to describe sediment before you learn to interpret it, which is the reverse of how most people would prefer to do it and produces better geologists.

The core laboratory holds the department's sediment cores, including a 2024 recovery from a basin off the shelf edge with a well-preserved section from the last interglacial. Undergraduates work on real core material, not teaching sets.

Field and sea time

More than any other program here. Coastal geomorphology runs almost entirely outdoors, and geophysics takes students to sea aboard R/V Cascadia Strait to run survey lines and process the results themselves.

Where it leads

Geotechnical and survey work, offshore site characterization, coastal management, environmental consulting, and graduate study in geology, geophysics or paleoclimate. The offshore energy sector — including wind — hires heavily from this discipline and students are often surprised how directly the training transfers.

What to expect

Weather, mud, and long days on a shoreline in conditions nobody would choose. There is a standing offer to any undergraduate willing to spend a semester describing core sections, which has never produced a queue.

Oceanography at Northmoor is a quantitative science degree. It is about how the ocean works as a physical and chemical system: why water moves where it does, what it carries, and how the whole thing couples to climate.

Every student in this program goes to sea aboard R/V Cascadia Strait. First-year students get a day trip. By the third year you may be running your own sampling station on a multi-day cruise, and by the fourth some students are writing their own science into a cruise plan.

What you study

The first year covers introductory oceanography and earth systems alongside the mathematics and physics core. The second year splits into the sub-disciplines — physical oceanography, chemical oceanography — and the third adds ocean observing systems and circulation and climate.

The program requires a data analysis course, and that requirement was argued for by the faculty on the grounds that a student who cannot handle a messy time series cannot do the science. Ocean data are gappy, noisy and unevenly sampled. Learning to work with them honestly is half the training.

Where it leads

Graduate study, agency and laboratory science, offshore and environmental consulting, instrument and survey work, and a steady stream into data-heavy roles outside the field entirely — the analysis training transfers further than students expect.

The department's own PhD program takes a small number of students each year, and several have come up through this degree.

What to expect

Mathematics, and more of it than students who chose the ocean for romantic reasons sometimes anticipate. Also genuine sea time: fourteen-day endurance, watch-standing, and weather that decides the schedule. Departures are never convenient.

Marine Engineering is an engineering degree with saltwater in it. The first two years are statics, fluid mechanics, materials and control — the same foundations any mechanical engineer needs — taught with marine examples throughout. The last two apply them to vehicles and structures that have to work in an environment that offers no second chances.

What you study

Statics and marine structures, then fluid mechanics, then naval architecture. From the third year the program splits toward two ends: underwater robotics on one side, coastal engineering design on the other. Most students take both and specialize late.

You will design, build and test an underwater vehicle. The Marine Robotics and Test Basin opened in 2026 for exactly this reason — the department spent four years arguing that it was teaching vehicle design to students who had never watched one fail somewhere recoverable. A failure in the basin costs an afternoon. The same failure offshore costs a day of ship time and leaves no evidence.

Where it leads

Offshore and subsea engineering, vehicle and instrument manufacturers, coastal protection and consulting practice, naval architecture, and graduate study. The MS in Ocean Engineering here takes a number of graduates each year.

Students often ask whether this degree limits them to marine work. It does not. The control, structures and systems training is standard engineering; the marine context is what makes it distinctive on an application.

What to expect

A heavy load in the first two years, and a lot of time in a building with a crane in it. The student competition team is optional and takes over the lives of the people who join it.

Aquaculture and Fisheries is a food production degree with a conservation science underneath it. The two halves are taught together because the industry does not separate them: the same regional questions about carrying capacity, disease, water quality and market access come up whether the animal was caught or grown.

What you study

Biology first — introductory marine biology and fish biology — then the applied sequence: principles of aquaculture, shellfish culture, stock assessment and sustainable systems.

Stock assessment is the technical heart of the fisheries side. It is the modeling that turns catch records, survey data and biological sampling into a defensible number for how much can be removed from a population. The models are old, the data are worse than anyone wants, and real people's livelihoods rest on the output. We teach it as applied statistics under conditions of moral seriousness.

The aquaculture side is increasingly a water chemistry problem. Regional hatcheries have had crop failures that track periods of low pH in their intake water, and working out when to buffer and when to close the intake is a live operational question rather than a textbook one.

Placements

The partnership with a regional shellfish hatchery places two students each summer. Placement students work a full production season and several have been hired directly afterward.

Where it leads

Hatchery and farm production, fisheries management with state and federal agencies, seafood industry roles, consulting, and graduate study. The MS in Marine Resource Management takes graduates of this program most years.

What to expect

Early mornings, animal husbandry that does not pause for weekends, and a fair amount of standing in water. Students who have worked on a boat or in a hatchery before tend to arrive knowing this.