Found: Geography Major

Owen Wilson-Chavez

UNT Geography, B.S., current Master's student

I know far too many people who have graduated with a bachelor’s degree in a field completely unrelated to what they have ended up doing. One of my friends got her B.A. in Political Science only to land a job at a sales company. She gets paid well, but what was the point of getting the degree in political science? Everyone I know in this situation seems to have gone to college to earn a degree so they can get a job. These days it seems that it’s the odd person, which I consider myself to be, who comes to college to learn. I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do with my life when I arrived at UNT. I knew that I liked international politics and that I might like to work for an NGO so I pursued a degree in International Studies. At that time the International Studies department was small. There were no International Studies courses, only an interdisciplinary list of approved courses that covered the different concentrations. It was a little disheartening, but if it hadn’t been that way I might never have explored other options and arrived where I am today.

I didn’t intend to pursue the International Studies degree after my first semester at UNT. I had taken a class in anthropology that I enjoyed and decided to change my direction. I got bored with it though. Wading through the universities core curriculum left me unmotivated, and I wasn’t as excited about anthropology after a semester or two. I had, however, taken a class in geography in that time (World Regional Geography with Dr. Lyons). I don’t think I ever missed a class. I showed up every day and absorbed the material. I can’t remember any other class that I actually read for at that point in my college career. I had finally found something that really excited me. It took me awhile after that to actually change my major to geography. I took a few more of the introductory courses before then and didn’t get bored. I found out pretty quickly that Human Geography was more interesting to me than Physical Geography, but I also found out that that’s OK. When I started taking more and more classes in geography I began to enjoy going to class, I didn’t even care what the class was (my interests were pretty broad).

The department itself was different, and I liked it. International Studies was very small, but you never managed to know who else shared your major when you didn’t have a set of classes. Anthropology was large, and I never seemed to have more than one or two people in a multiple classes. Geography was small, and we all took the same classes. I remember going from Economic Geography (Dr. Lyons) to Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa (Dr. Oppong) with a large number of the same people. The next semester several of those same people were in more of my classes. It helped to create and foster friendships with my colleagues. I went from taking classes with a friend here and there to taking classes with friends and acquaintances. It’s something I don’t hear about a lot. There are departments like ours in that regard (Art, Music, and RTVF come to mind), but in my experience it’s the exception.

Having friends in your classes makes the classes themselves easier to tackle, and when you take a class like Quantitative Methods or the Capstone course you want friends to help push you along. I remember hearing horror stories about Quantitative Methods from other students, and I was more than a little intimidated by the course when it first started. I had had classes with most of the people that took it with me, and when we were told to form study groups it felt natural to make one with people I was familiar with. We all helped each other out that semester. We usually got together more than once a week to go over notes and help each other figure out the material; it worked well. When we moved on to the Capstone course we were already used to getting together, so we kept it going. I’m not sure if any of us would have been able to feel as confident with our work in that course if we hadn’t all stayed together and helped each other out that semester.  Those bonds helped us through other classes too, but anyone who reads this as a geography undergrad at UNT should know that forming friendships with your classmates can help you out just as much as showing up to class and studying.

When I was nearing the end of my degree I started really thinking about graduate school. I knew I wanted to continue my education in geography, and UNT felt like the perfect place to do it at. The department was right up my alley. Every professor I had at least seemed passionate about what they were teaching, which makes the learning environment that much better. Dr. Pan’s enthusiasm in Fluvial Geomorphology kept me going even though the material was well over my head, and I made it through having learned material that an inattentive, bored professor would have never gotten into my head. Dr. Wolverton managed to help me understand statistical analysis years after I’d sworn off any ability to understand statistics.  I could easily keep going with an example from every professor I had as an undergraduate, and that played a part in deciding to remain at UNT for my Master’s degree.

I feel that my time as a geography undergrad helped me out greatly. I definitely learned the necessity of working with others, not just to help understand classes but to actually make friends with a variety of people. The work in my courses prepared me for work in the real world, and if I was inclined to do so I feel that I would have had no problem in using my degree to get a job in almost any field where a geographic perspective is needed. Of course, more than anything, it cultivated my passion for geography and the desire to continue my geographic education at a higher level.