Careers & Internships in Geology

Find your passion--and your future--in energy, the environment, paleontology and more. See "Geology Majors Gain Career Insights at Ohio Geologic Survey."

• Explore Handshake for internships, jobs, or volunteer opportunities. This system is free to Ohio University students.
• About Graduate School
• Alumni Advisory Board
• What Geologists Do

Department Internship Coordinator: Dr. Keith Milam

Individualized Career Coaching for Arts & Sciences Students

College of Arts & Sciences students can take advantage of individualized career coaching, with many resources to help them prepare for successful lives. Students with liberal arts degrees are highly sought after because they are educated to think critically and become problem solvers for 21st century issues.

• Make an appointment with OHIO's Career Network, by logging into Handshake!

Trends in Career Opportunities for Geologists

• Currently, there are too few geologists to go around. As a result, 100 percent of OHIO Geological Sciences undergraduates land jobs or go on to graduate school.
• All of the graduate M.S. students land jobs. In fact, a student who received his B.S. and M.S. from OHIO recently moved on to an entry-level $95,000 a year job with Exxon.
• Alumni who work for businesses and governmental organizations in need of more geologists regularly send job announcements.
• Professors welcome opportunities to work with undergraduates on research. In fact, they encourage all undergraduates to pursue research.
• Many students have switched from other majors, and the department consistently graduates most of these students on time.

The Geological Sciences Department offers strong, well respected, discipline-wide majors programs.

The undergraduate programs prepare students for careers in the geological sciences by requiring or offering a broad spectrum of courses spanning the environmental sciences, sedimentary and paleontological fields, and hard rock geology.

The department prepares students to be competitive in the job and graduate school markets by encouraging them to take applied courses. The geology job market is one of only a few to grow stronger over the last decade. Thanks to ongoing expansions in the environmental and petroleum industries, geology alumni are working throughout the United States and abroad.

The M.S. graduate program places nearly 100 percent of its graduates in jobs in environmental firms, extraction industries, and public agencies. A number of recent graduates are pursuing doctoral degrees, and faculty are proud to report that they are doing extremely well. These enviable records reflect the value of the department's courses, professional development, and—importantly—the faculty advising philosophy.

As an M.S.-only program, the department can focus on the development of master's students, whereas dual M.S./Ph.D. programs often focus heavily on their doctoral students. The department faculty believe M.S. students should have ready access to their advisers, clear plans of study designed to "get them out" in two years, and broad departmental support. These values draw students to Ohio University's Geological Sciences program, and prospective students are encouraged to contact the professors whose research they find interesting.