hello everyone welcome thanks for joining us hi everybody we're going to get started momentarily hello everyone welcome to the Stony Brook University undergraduate admissions virtual session with the school of marine and atmospheric sciences I'm Amanda Mills assistant director of admissions congratulations to those of you who have been accepted to Stony Brook this year just to put in perspective how impressive that is this year we've received just about 50 000 applications for first year admissi
on and we expect a class of about 3 600 first-year students so again congratulations on all of your hard work um and good luck with your final decision making process and for those of you that are joining us and are just beginning your college search we wish you the best of luck for an exciting Journey explore the admissions section of our website for additional virtual or in-person visit options and the summer tour schedule will be updated starting in May for today's session please use the Q a
feature to ask questions about today's topic special programs in the school of marine and atmospheric sciences and this session is being recorded and will be available on the admissions YouTube page soon now please join me in welcoming our first Speaker Dr Kurt brush director of semester by the Sea and the Marine Science Club advisor Kurt great thank you Amanda and good evening everyone Welcome to our presentation tonight we'll be discussing special programs the focus will be on experiential edu
cation within somas so I think the first thing to do is really Define what experiential education is so Amanda next thank you Amanda so on the slide we can see various types of experiential education over on the left when you're at Stony Brook you're going to be taking your foundational courses your diversity in the curriculum courses and the courses that are required for your major but your education at Stony Brook and Somas should be so much more than just coursework in the classroom or perhap
s during some online courses while you're here you want to build your resume you want to get strong letters of recommendation from professors advisors and mentors that you're working with and you want to be prepared to go out into the job field once you graduate so again much more than just classroom work so let's talk about what experiential education is and what we offer within Somas to help you get some experiential education so experience experiential education could be anything from researc
h so getting involved in a research lab while you're an undergraduate and we really encourage that within all divisions in Somas and there are many opportunities for you to do that to work with the professor and to work with graduate students and to try some research ideas that you might have or to try on some research topics that you might be interested in we also have a lot of Project based courses that get you some hands-on experience experiences designing projects collecting data analyzing t
hat data testing hypo disease we have a lot of field-based courses at our various facilities around Long Island we have the main campus we have the flax Pond Marine laboratory near Main Campus we have the Southampton Marine station which you can see in the picture kind of behind me we also have scuba courses you can get certified in scuba you can take several courses and apply those skills we have a lot of study abroad experiences at many countries around the world we have a lot of internships w
ith partner organizations here on the island and elsewhere as well and internships are a way in which you can try on a job basically or a career you kind of get a sense of the type of job that you might want to have as a career later on you can get involved in the culture in that particular field or that particular job or career so internships are a great way again to try out some ideas that you might have about types of careers we also have jobs within Soma so we have some training that you can
do and I'll get into this in just a few slides and you can actually get paid as well if you're interested in teaching many of our courses work with undergraduate teaching assistants so you'll help other undergraduates these are typically for introductory courses you'll help them learn the material improve their study skills understand the concepts and so on we also have the immersive semester by the C program down at the Southampton campus which I'll talk about in a little bit and student clubs
as well which is another type of experiential education which uh Dr Ryder will talk about soon all right so again lots of opportunities we're going to discuss all of these tonight um these experiential education opportunities within Somas over on the right I mentioned this already why you should seek out experiential education while you're here again you can apply Concepts that you learn in the classroom you can apply those Concepts to sampling equipment that you're using out in the field hypot
hesis testing in the laboratory or in the field as well you can build your resume a lot of these experiential education experience experiential education opportunities they look great on your on your resume um you can Network in your field as well make contacts for future employers internship opportunities and so on once you get plugged into some of these experiential education opportunities you'll learn about a whole slew of other scholarships internships jobs and so on once you open that door
it's a great way to learn about you know furthering your experiential education you also get exposed to a lot of new ideas not just from your college professors by other the Professionals in the field colleagues your peers as well as I mentioned getting those letters of recommendation is really important for getting a job after graduation confirming your decisions within your career or perhaps closing some doors that get internships research many of these experiences they're a great way to as I
said test something out and if you end up if it turns out that you don't like it that's okay too you can close that door behind you and focus on something else so again all of this is leading towards your graduation getting a job afterwards or going to graduate school and again these experiential education opportunities they look great on your resume and this is what employers and potential advisors in grad school really want to see okay next slide Amanda please all right so we're going to talk
about various opportunities in research in our divisions within Soma so again within Somas we have three divisions there's the Marine Division there's the atmospheric and ocean Sciences Division and there's the sustainability division so I'll focused on the Marine research division we have a list here of just some of the many opportunities that you have to get involved with our professors and graduate students doing real Marine research so again I'm not going to read through all of them but you
can kind of just scroll through there with your eyes and see that we have a diversity of projects that our faculty are exploring everything from Deep Sea zooplankton fish identification out in the deep ocean where shallow water to Dolphin foraging Behavior seagrass ecosystem relationships lots of harmful algal bloom research opportunities in aquaculture in New York we've got a marine disease lab again you can look through this list on your own but you'll see that the research that we offer withi
n somos runs the gamut of nearly any topic you can think of a broad topic within Marine research and again as you're doing this you're not only working in our Laboratories but you have opportunities to do research on our research vessels like the Sea Wolf out of Port Jefferson Harbor or the many vessels that go out of our Southampton facility we also as I said have the flax Pond lab and the Southampton lab as well both have running seawater systems that allow you to conduct a lot of experiments
exploring these topics in our facilities okay next slide Amanda please okay atmospheric research so this is again another division that we have in in Somas and we have several faculty members who work very closely with undergraduates and they get an undergraduate to get involved in the list of topics that we see uh here so we've got a radar truck that our faculty use with the undergraduates we often release weather balloons and collect data under all conditions as you can kind of see here in tha
t picture in that on the top right there we go out on fairies and vessels and collect data we use drones we have some faculty that actually fly planes and look at air quality and we have a lot of laboratory facilities in which you can analyze the data that you're collecting out there in the field working with the faculty all right next slide please amid it the atmospheric division also has facilities that allow forecasters and meteorologists to actually go in front of a screen and produce some s
ome forecasting um so they work with the Stony Brook news and often this leads to internships with local news organizations as well so again you get some on-campus experience with our own kind of Stony Brook internal News broadcasting programs but again it often leads to jobs internships elsewhere so fantastic facilities if you're interested in becoming a on-screen kind of meteorologist a forecaster within atmospheric sciences okay next will be Dr Ryder to talk about opportunities and research i
n the sustainability division muted Tara sorry about that hello everyone uh So within the sustainability studies division in which we have majors in sustainability environmental design policy and planning Coastal Environmental Studies we have a large emphasis like the other Majors do on getting experiential learning and that includes research opportunities um So within our Majors we require either an internship or a research uh part uh credits for your to complete your major So within sustainabi
lity studies I have had students who have done research both on campus with faculty but also outside of Campus both on Long Island and in other parts of New York and actually the US you can see some of the examples here we've had students who are working within climate action so looking at public advocacy they're doing research on sharks in our marine environment they're also looking at how changes in policy have impacted our local communities and various policies at local Regional and National
levels so again research is a an important chance to get an idea of what are you interested in doing Amanda next slide please so another component of this experiential learning is having project-based courses within the sustainability studies field we have an ecotoxicology lab that is typically known as the worm lab and in its students design and do experiments studying the impact of toxins such as Roundup have on both the soil and the organisms within the soil and they have gotten several of th
eir papers published over the years we also have a Capstone class that's are integrated collaborative systems class and students have done projects that have been uh writing grants in order to create design and ultimately install butterfly and a pollinator Garden here on campus uh students this semester currently are focused on natural and living shorelines so dealing with issues of storm surges and they will be dealing directly with policy makers out on the East End of Long Island to help incor
porate these ideas into the laws and into the initiative so they get the chance to really see their projects take root and ultimately make an impact on the local communities next slide please so back to Kurt okay great thanks Tara um before I started talking about fuel base based courses let me just wrap up with the the research so as Dr Ryder said you can earn credits um by getting involved in research so again not only are you exploring potential career paths and ideas but you are earning cred
its to fulfill your kind of full-time student status so we really hope that you'll consider getting involved in research with our our various Labs or professors and graduate students and often the earlier you do that the the better within all divisions because if you get involved as a freshman or perhaps a sophomore by the time you're a junior or senior you often have a lot more responsibility within that research group and that can lead to you know exploring your own hypotheses designing your o
wn experiments doing a Capstone project doing an honors thesis so please consider again when you arrive at Stony Brook you're going to be busy from day one but please consider making some connections with faculty and graduate students and considering getting involved in a research program okay the next topic we want to talk about in terms of experiential learning is field-based courses and this is something both Dr Ryder and I love to do um in fact we we co-teach a course a coastal cultural expe
rience which you can see on the list here so we offer a lot of field-based courses um primarily at the Southampton campus but there are also some up at the main campus such as Long Island Marine habitats and the idea is that we get you out of the classroom and out into the field and field in this instance doesn't mean a a discipline within a career but literally out in the field so into the forests on the water around the water and often in the water with some of our courses so again there are s
everal that are listed here uh again mostly at the Southampton campus that you can see the exception is the Long Island Pine Barrens shown here in the top left there's an image there but the pine Barons are a wonderful kind of a habitat that we have here kind of mid Island and moving towards the East End wonderful preserves replenishes or Aqua or our aquifer here for our drinking water in Long Island uh wonderful trails to explore for biking and hiking and we have faculty members that take stude
nts out into the system to understand the history of the preservation of the Pine Barrens and the importance of the Prime bariums as well the other courses that you see listed here are primarily Marine kind of oriented courses um Coastal cultural experience again that's the course that Dr Ryder and I co-teach on Fridays that's a maritime culture course so we actually take students out on Fridays in the fall and we visit important Maritime sites primarily on the East End of Long Island so Sag Har
bor whaling museum the Montauk Point and Lighthouse the Fire Island Lighthouse we take a whole day and go up to the Mystic Seaport across the Long Island Sound I actually have a kayaking trip we spend a few hours kayaking up in North Sea Harbor pull out on the beach have a little cookout we're onto bonfire uh Dr Rada gives a few little mini lectures there as we do during The Kayaks um but as you can imagine we are literally in the field there and on the water and sometimes even in the water if s
tudents don't manage to stay in their kayaks um biological oceanography physical oceanography experimental marine biology ichthyology these are also courses we offer at Southampton that have a very intensive field component to them now when you're taking these field oriented classes you're getting exposed to the habitats directly the organisms the natural communities there the cultural sites you're often interacting with docents or Rangers so you're able to expand your career Network and again p
ick their brains about jobs or internship opportunities you're also being trained to use sampling gear and techniques so this again can build your resume and make you more appealing for future employers or for graduate school next slide please okay so we also offer kind of a scuba program and this is something new in the last few years that we're very proud of so um within Somas students can get certified in scuba during the fall semester and the spring semester so you'll get certified which las
ts for a lifetime and also you can earn credits during the fall and spring while getting certified the Marine Science Club also offers certification during the summer you can't earn credits there but you can get certified so again lots of opportunities to get this very important skill that a lot of marine scientists want for again employment or graduate school and a lot of folks who even aren't Marine scientists necessarily full-time they want to have this skill so they can explore the Underwate
r World throughout their life as they travel so again once you get that certification card whenever you're traveling you're certified to dive typically at any facility that you go to or any destination all right so the second course that we offer is scientific diving another Southampton course this is in the fall this is a course that trains you to use scientific skills underwater so you lay out transects you'll learn some new safety skills you'll learn how to collect data again this makes you v
ery employable in the future for many jobs and also makes you very appealing for graduate programs that require this skill to do Marine ecology work or other types of research the third course and I'm just going to mention here Dr Ryder will talk about it because it is a study abroad course as well but this is tropical morning ecology it's offered in Jamaica and I need to edit this slide because we actually are starting to think about taking students to the South Pacific again we did this a few
years ago we actually went to Fiji I say we um I'm not actually teaching this course it's Dr Peterson and Dr Warren both from the Southampton facility and I was just kind of a hanger on her um but I had a great time interacting with the students in Fiji a few years ago this last year we actually went to the Solomon Islands to check out another potential field site in the South Pacific so when you arrive here at Stony Brook um during your four years you could have an opportunity to go to perhaps
both Jamaica and perhaps the South Pacific or one or the other the last uh the last program that we have here under scuba is coral conservation this is a relatively new one we think it may be offered again this early summer but it's a chance to look at Coral and coral conservation in the Red Sea okay I'll hand this off to Dr Ryder again for the next slide Amanda for study abroad programs so with study abroad you can experience new places and cultures you get to gain a a Global Perspective at the
same time as earning credits that will help you complete your degree and travel abroad allows you to develop skills that are incredibly valued by uh both the professional Fields as well as thinking about graduate school because you get skills like Intercultural communication adaptability and problem solving now Stony Brook as a whole has programs and exchanges to over a hundred different countries but within Thomas we have several that will help fulfill the requirements within our major um we h
ave a program and I'm going to put it right out there and say I'm completely biased about the Ireland and England program as the Director of that program but we spend four weeks in Ireland and England studying environmental history and contemporary environmental issues and policies um so we explore how Ireland and the British Isles are have dealt with environmental problems in the past how those problems play out today and what is the direction we can go um we also have through uh Somas faculty
a program to Tanzania again I have some bias on this one having actually gone as a faculty member last summer and their students are looking at the relationship between environment and health and they'll get to go um to several different parts of Tanzania including uh three to four days of going on Safari where you're going to see elephants and uh cheetahs I saw a leopard I saw I don't even know how many thousands zebras um so it's an incredible experience and it really does open you up to what
people around the world are experiencing we also have a winter program that goes to Cuba looking at the environmental Humanities and looking at the the various kind of issues that are happening um within that island and as we mentioned before we also have the winter program to Jamaica where you're studying tropical ecology and who wouldn't want to be in Jamaica in January getting this chance to snorkel or to scuba while you're down there and these experiences helped you give you more hands-on ex
perience not only in your field but also in this kind of larger um Global sense and so we really do strongly encourage our students to participate in these programs and as I said they do help you move along your Majors Path if you think about planning them into your program uh Amanda next slide thank you so one of the things that we've talked quite a bit about is internships as I said we have a huge emphasis on experiential learning and internships are one of the ways to earn credits for your ma
jor and you can do internships I've had students do internships every single summer some of them are doing them during the semester so you have a lot of different um times when you can do an internship um you can earn credits some internships you can even get paid um as Dr brush said it is a chance to to try out a job to figure out is this what you really want to do um and ultimately it helps you to build a network um we do Post internship opportunities on our various Community pages that we hav
e with our students through faculties but students are also welcome to find an internship so if they are from something place and have worked with an organization they can help set up an internship opportunity that way and what you see on the screen is a very small number of internship organizations that our students have worked with ranging from the Atlantic marine conservation Society um to and the Long Island Aquarium to the MTA and the National Weather Service to working with the various tow
ns on Long Island and Beyond Long Island next slide so some other opportunities that you might want to take advantage of while at Stony Brook and a Soma student are being an undergraduate teaching assistant and I mentioned this earlier this is a very powerful experiential learning opportunity if you especially if you want to go into teaching it's also a way that you can kind of cement the concepts in your in your mind I think those of us who teach probably would all agree that one of the best wa
ys of learning something learning a concept is actually try and teach it to somebody um so we have opportunities again with many of our intro courses for undergraduates to get involved and work with their peers typically this is when the student is a junior or senior but again they can get some teaching experience as well as earn credit while they're doing it we also have employment in all of our divisions or some opportunities for employment within all of our divisions but just a few uh that I
listed up here um down at the Southampton Marine station and I think even on the sea with on occasion you can work as a deckhand so you can go out during field trips with other students and deploy equipment help retrieve the equipment bring the the vessels in and out of the dock and it's not just with the college groups but we also have a lot of visiting School groups you know from elementary school students to high school students to outside organizations that come out to Southampton especially
and do some field trips and you can work as a deckhand there um and then again the research Labs many of them will actually pay students to do research during the summer or sometimes even during the school year so again both are a powerful experiential learning opportunities here next slide please okay so I I've mentioned the semester by the Sea earlier so let me explain what this is um so a lot of our students in the Marine Division um as well as the sustainability division sometimes come to S
tony Brook and Somas because they like to do the semester by the Sea so uh to be clear this this is a Stony Brook Somas program so participation does not require any additional application um as a Stony Brook student you fairly simply take your courses at the South Hampton campus the Stony Brook Southampton campus it's designed for juniors and seniors so we want our students to get the prerequisites out of the way first because they're all upper level courses within this program we want you to f
ulfill your diversity and education uh requirements up at the main campus first as well once you are a junior or a senior you can come down to the Southampton campus and take one course two courses we really try and encourage you to take your full semester at Southampton though um you can live in the residence Halls at Southampton or you can commute in from off campus if you live off campus but you can do your full semester down there in the fall and or the spring and sometimes we'll have studen
ts that spend time down there they spend a fall a spring and sometimes a second fall down there as well and sometimes even a second spring down there depending on what courses they select and if they're involved in the research Labs at Southampton so again this is designed to be a very very immersive experience it's typically a small cohort of students that are down there so while each semester we have about 80 or so students taking one class or more at Southampton in the fall we usually have ab
out 20 to 28 students living in the residence halls and in the spring typically about maybe 12 or 15 students living in the residence Halls within the the semester by the Sea program there are other programs at Southampton at the South Hampton campus but they're both graduate programs one's a suite of Health Sciences Pro programs and the other is an art program a creative writing program so again we say that it's very immersive depending on what courses you select you can expect to be out in the
field so again in the water on the water around the water as much as maybe even three or four times a week depending on what courses you're you're taking so again we encourage you to come down to the Southampton campus and participate in a semester by the C program once you arrive you're going to be having lots of info sessions I am up at the main campus every year a couple times talking with you about this helping you prepare so Moss is undergraduate advisor uh Nancy black will also help you p
repare for this so you can fit it in in your junior or senior year so please look forward to coming down and joining us for the semester by the Sea at Southampton um next slide please and I think Dr Ryder is going to take this one so we do recognize that the experience of in the classroom in that kind of academic setting but is the the social aspect and so there are a variety of clubs obviously across the entire University but many of them are actually related and really our students and Somas a
re involved in these and you'll see that there is an element of socializing but there's also development of activism that's going on it is a way for students to create peer networks so they can ask each other about classes they can share share you know the various opportunities they've had and it's also about building a network within your field because your peers will become your professional colleagues as you go forward um so you see a couple of the clubs that we have we have the Marine Scienc
e Club just this past weekend they organized a beach cleanup but they also do things as they said on here they have a marine geek movie nights um they also help to get students involved in research we have the environmental Club they do a lot of elements of again working within the environment they they are running a cleanup next week in honor of Earth Day they work at raising awareness at local and Regional events about the various environmental issues we're facing today we have the meteorologi
cal Club um who's you know anyone who's interested in the weather and the phenomena and one of the things to keep in mind is that these clubs are open to anyone so you don't have to be a marine science major or even a minor it could just be something you're really passionate about and that's a a really good way to get larger conversations going and to recognize you know everyone brings something to the table we have um Sunrise which is a advocacy club and we have swims which is the society for w
omen in Marine Science And So within swims we have a monthly swim Inspiration series um where uh women in various um parts of their Marine science uh Journey from you know recent undergraduates um to people at the very Pinnacle of the the their with their PHD who are chief editors of journals will talk to our students they're also involved in doing research currently they're going to be working on an eelgrass project so it's another way to get involved that is fun but at the same time you're lea
rning and quite often making a difference in your local community uh next slide please okay I think that wraps up our presentation um both I think we should have said this at the beginning perhaps but um both uh Dr Ryder and I are senior lecturers uh within Somas um so we were actually hired to teach um and we both love these immersive experiences both teaching them and getting the students involved um and the many experiential opportunities that we offer within somas so I think we'll hand it ov
er back to Amanda she wants to run the Q a session hi everybody so we have some great questions uh some were pre-submitted summer uh live questions this um evening and just to kind of get us started we had a question about um graduate pathway opportunities so I guess either direct graduate school admission Pathways or you know outside of Stony Brook so you have a couple of avenues we do have a few uh combined um Pathways that you will see so with Environmental Studies you can also do a combined
pathway into the marine conservation and policy program um but the undergraduates our students will often both go immediately into graduate school and they can go for a master's or a PhD and they are set up um and accepted into graduate programs across the board um we also have a lot of students who opt to take a little bit of time to work in the field um today we actually just have one of the things that we do run as an alumni panel so we have students who from the last couple years come back a
nd kind of talk to our students about what their pathway was some of them had an immediate graduate degree others had some of the time off um but they are you know they're given they're able to talk to their advisors and decide what is the pathway that will work best for what they're interested in doing So within the Marine Division we also have the combined plan The Five-Year Plan where you can earn your bachelor's and Master's in five years I think across the board um this is a it's an opportu
nity but it's really for just very few students um to actually do this successfully it really requires that you get involved in some research probably pretty early on um you do need to declare this as a junior you need a pretty high GPA so for some students it works out uh really well if they know really kind of that career path out there that they want to aim for in a research project that they want to do for uh their their master's degree but as I said it requires getting involved in a researc
h lab early on having an advisor that's willing to work with you for this program um I tend to advise a lot of my students to really you know um even though it sounds good um sometimes to get get both of these done as quickly as possible when you're an undergraduate uh you have so many opportunities to try things out that you'll not get later in life so again while we offer these programs um for most students I think I would advise them not not to rush and to take advantage of their four years a
t Stony Brook and do multiple internships multiple research experiences and all of these other kind of opportunities that that we've talked about one thing that we didn't mention I think explicitly yeah in both Dr Ryder and I can talk about this is we have mentorship programs within Somas um we have a mentorship program through the diversity equity and inclusion program within Somas and then we have a mentorship program within swims which Dr Ryder can can talk a bit more about but both of these
programs are designed to match students up upon their request with mentors whether they're faculty members or graduate students and they can mentor students you know in all aspects of their their field their career but especially in preparation for graduate school and then finally before I maybe pass it back to Dr writer again getting involved in the research Labs many any of our our undergraduates who have projects within the labs that they kind of own they often go to conferences they make pre
sentations they Network they meet potential graduate school advisors so again many opportunities to prepare yourself well for graduate school and make yourself competitive for graduate school today graduate school is quite heavily emphasized sizing made the connection with your advisor and the experiential learning opportunities that students get as undergraduates helps to set up those future opportunities as Dr brush said I am the advisor for swims here at Stony Brook and swims is actually a Na
tional Organization that was founded at the Woods Hole oceanographic Institute and So within the swims mentorship program first of all within swims itself we actually have members that are undergraduates graduate students post doctorates faculty um and so we've set up both a swims mentoring program through the Stony Brook Community but students can also be part of the larger swims National organizations mentoring program which has opened up some avenues for research and again creating networks t
hat will potentially lead to graduate opportunities along that way so mentoring whether it's in a a formal setting such as the the swims Mentor program but also simply I really strongly encourage students come talk to your professors during our office hours and you will find that quite often many of us have students that we have become mentors too because we've had that personal connection with them that was what I I really had the pleasure today with so many of the alumni they came back because
I've stayed in touch with them not only as undergrads but I've remained in touch with them for the last five or ten years and so these are networks that you're creating right from the very beginning our next question we we may have answered during the presentation but it was asked very early on um does Stony Brook have an on-site wet lab or other designated site for studying aquatic organisms so yes I I think we addressed that again we can see the Southampton lab right behind me uh it's about a
n hour uh east of the main campus it's just as you get onto the South Fork of Long Island um that's kind of our one of our larger facilities that has a running seawater there's a lot of experiments being conducted there on everything from kind of harmful algal blooms to Predator prey relationships to ocean acidification um we also have the flax Pond lab which was recent recently renovated and so that's a facility that will do a lot of kind of aquaculture experiments we have the the Marine diseas
e lab within somos that also has experiments running I think at both facilities actually um so yes we do have on the water running seawater facilities too actually within within somos plus our vessels as well thanks so this is a very specific question but I think kind of in a broader sense the question is if I'm a different major in this case computer science and I am passionate about marine biology I plan to minor in Marine Marine Science um how much access will I have to you know both the clas
ses and the Hands-On experiences and what sort of prerequisites would I need but um those would probably be covered by um you know some of the general science and math courses but just in general like does a minor have as much access as a major so so we're we're taking in a lot of marine science students our our program is uh proving to be very popular so many of our upper level courses are are filling with Marine science students and by that I mean the majors the Marine science major the Marine
vertebrate biology major um the Environmental Studies Majors um but if you declare a minor if you have a major in a different unit and you declare a minor during enrollment the enrollment sequence you will have kind of a higher priority to get into these classes so um I think the short answer is uh yes as a minor you you should have access to all of these courses as well we are trying to expand our courses some of the enrollment era courses we're getting a few more resources to to actually do t
hat so yeah if you're interested in Marine Biology um but your primary major is something that's not directly related being a minor will give you access to nearly all of these courses and certainly the opportunities again many of these opportunities that we're talking about the internships the research you know they're kind of self-directed you need to reach out first to The Faculty members and we can help you do that um and the potential internship institutions um but yeah you've got access to
all those as well I was about to say currently because I work very closely with the the New York Marine rescue center um two of my interns one is a business major and one is a studio Arts major and they're interning with you know within this kind of marine field because they are passionate about that as well one it has a minor um one has not declared either a minor or a major so you do have opportunities that are available to you and again please join the clubs too I mean that's another way to g
et involved if you go I don't quite want to have a whole major I want to do a minor or even just getting involved at a club level um so this question I think is just something that does come up a lot because of the kind of confusion about having two campuses but just to kind of clarify and reiterate uh students asking if they can go directly into their major to the Southampton campus if they've already decided their major so just to clarify how where they where you start and where most students
stay sure the answer is no just to be Crystal Clear um when you first arrive at Stony Brook unless you're a transfer student coming in and there's some uh sometimes if you've met the prerequisites at a different school and you're transferring in you might be able to do the semester by the Sea at Southampton but uh again Nancy black can assist you with that somas's undergraduate advisor if you're coming in as a as a freshman kind of a traditional freshman no you should not expect to be at the Sou
thampton campus for probably maybe a year and a half at least perhaps you can take some courses during the Spring of your sophomore year um but yeah you should really plan on waiting until your junior or senior year and again you've got obligations at Main Campus and you want to take care of those first so you can be fully immersed at the Southampton campus and take all your classes down there the exception to this is a course that I haven't talked about yet but it's my summer oceanography cours
e I teach that at this Southampton campus and it's our typical oceanography course that we have during the semester it's condensed and in two weeks in July so you earn your three credits during those two weeks we throw a few field trips in there that we don't offer at Main Campus um so you could potentially take that course at Southampton during the summer though um you know even before you arrive there are a few seats left for this summer actually uh that this this this July um so that's an opp
ortunity that course is actually required now for our Marine Science Majors not not the Southampton course but just oceanography introduction to oceanography and we offer that actually fulfill several of our Majors um either requirements or electives yeah so we do offer oceanography at the main campus in the fall and the spring but also at Southampton in the summer and a follow-up question um does Stony Brook offer a semester at Sea program or are we affiliated with one um so we do not offer one
directly however um you do have opportunities to do these types of uh exchanges or through like the national uh student exchange we also work with SCA the C Education Association um and that is an opportunity to be on a a research sailing vessel um and you can be in the the South Pacific there's some incredible opportunities and again um that is something that you may do but it's not directly through Stony Brook University so it's a matter of getting transfer credits let me can I just add somet
hing to the uh the sca to see Education Association so um we we work fairly closely with them we typically have a student going to their program every year or so and as Dr writer said um you're doing Marine Science and you're sailing a tall ship in the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic or the Caribbean um and they actually like our semester by the Sea students because our semester by the Sea students are really well prepared in terms of Marine Science field work Maritime studies and so on so they ac
tually offer a scholarship you can actually get a six thousand dollar scholarship with SCA if you do our semester by the C program first so again this is something we can talk about this is this isn't anything that you'd want to do until you're likely a junior or senior again that that's um I see Education Association program but we'll be happy to chat with you Dr Ryder or I and several of our other faculty members are very familiar with that program and we can help help get you there um so this
is a great kind of clarifying question because we have quite a few Majors within the school of marine and atmospheric sciences but the um our guest is asking if atmospheric sciences and Marine Sciences are a combined degree or if they're two separate majors there are two separate Majors so you're going to major in atmospheric sciences or you can major in Marine Science or you can meet you're in Marine vertebrates or you can major in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Marine Science w
e also have a couple other concentrations within Environmental Studies so we do have several Majors they are independent uh we do also have minors so some of our students will major in one of the Somas majors and maybe minor in something else or some double major but they are separate majors and we have a question that was specifically about our study abroad programs within Somas and if any of them are available freshman year very ambitious get get get out there and travel right away right and t
hat's great we do have uh so many different programs and I've had students go on multiple programs they they get the travel bug um most of our summer programs uh would be fine after your freshman year um I do run a program to Ireland in the winter it is a history based course but because of my background it tends to be heavily environmental um that does not fulfill any of the Soma's major requirements but it does fulfill the SBC the Stony Brook curriculum General Ed requirements so I actually ge
t quite a few freshmen on that one um we do take um what we would call a rising sophomore um can go on the Tanzania program can go to the Cuba program um and potentially could go on the Ireland or England program typically those are more likely to be junior seniors same thing with tropical ecology in Jamaica you're going to be more likely because of the the background the prerequisites going to be a junior or senior um but again there are many kind of avenues we do have other programs that are n
ot run by isomis faculty but fulfill major requirements like the one in Madagascar and that has taken freshmen um during the the summer after their freshman year so you can travel pretty early on and one thing I would like to say is if you're thinking about doing study abroad we have some really great scholarship opportunities so again it's not something to stay away from because you think you can't afford it um 29 out of my 30 students had scholarships and when I asked why the 30th you know wha
t had he applied for he hung his head guilty and said well I just assumed I wouldn't get one so he didn't apply so again study abroad is actually something very much within the reach of our students and we have a question about some examples of courses taught in Southampton and are there opportunities for students in all the divisions or just some of the majors sure so um at Southampton we teach courses that are mostly for the Marine Division Majors so the Marine science major the Marine vertebr
ate biology major and the ens major but again as we've talked about if you have a minor uh you'd be taking those courses out there as well um so many of them are our upper level kind of Marine Science courses like biological oceanography physical oceanography ichthyology chemical oceanography although we also teach that at a couple of the main campus experimental marine biology uh marine conservation uh Long Island Marine habitats but we also have several courses um many of which Dr Ryder teache
s uh that again often have a lot of other majors in them so Maritime traditions of New England Coastal cultural experience course Unsinkable Technologies is another course that she teaches in the spring so most of the courses like if you're looking at a full semester at Southampton most students will be Marine Division Majors every now and then we've got an exception though and there's actually a full list of courses for the fall and spring semester if you go to the semester by the sea or do a s
earch for a semester by the sea or check out the Southampton campus websites you can see it kind of exactly what um those two different semesters look like in terms of the the classes um and so we have a question from a transfer student who's coming to Stony Brook as a sophomore Marine science major and wants to know if there are any specific Somas courses that they missed or that they'd have to make up since their first year was spent elsewhere or if they're mostly gen Ed prerequisite courses u
m it depends on where you're coming from this is I think this is a question for Nancy black again most transfer students will meet with her right away um against somas's undergraduate advisor so I think the answer would would vary dramatically there's there's no there's no one definite answer the likelihood is some of the classes and you might have others you still have to kind of meet it's there's a lot of different Pathways here um but again you should if you're concerned about being behind I
think if you're coming in your sophomore year you should be in a relatively good place still so I wouldn't in any way have like a a panic that you're behind because you need to start at Stony Brook yeah and during Summer Orientation the advisors will look at your intended major and how your credits are transferring in what courses you've already completed and they'll kind of plug in you know what you've done and what you've checked off and and what you still need to do um to get into a lot of yo
ur major specific courses um so you don't have to kind of fret about that too soon uh they will assist you with all of that um have a question about like what a typical semester is like but I don't know if that really exists for any students in college um any any kind of way to answer that why was if you go to the Somas website and you click on the major that you're interested in what we have done is laid out kind of a possible way to look at your your four years so kind of giving you an idea of
what classes you might choose to take on a kind of semester by semester semester by semester basis but there's a lot of options in there um we can have students in let's say the Marine science major they take the same core and Foundation classes but they may take very different electives within that set um so again those things vary your how you choose to do your SBC or Stony Brook curriculum requirements um students fulfill them in different ways so there isn't one everyone is following the sa
me path here and that's actually one of the things that makes the the peer-to-peer interactions in classes and outside of the classroom such as in clubs so really kind of critical because you're getting to see what all of these different experiences are um so we have a student who's wondering if they come to Stony Brook as one of the Somas majors and then at some point they realize they want to be a different Somas major how hard is that is that challenging what what are some of the obstacles th
ey might face it depends on again the answer will vary depending which major you're coming from and going to um and again this is a question I'd refer to um uh Nancy black meeting with with her as Dr writer said you know many of the majors have the same prerequisites the same kind of foundational courses so we do see students switching Majors we certainly do that uh see that quite a bit actually um so again there's no definitive answer here um um it it's done and it's done you know fairly common
ly I hopefully that's helpful and one of the things to keep in mind not only do you have an incredible resource in Nancy black who is the undergraduate advisor for all of our Soma students you also have faculty advisors for each of the majors so in my case I'm the faculty advisor for Environmental Studies so I can sit with you and very closely go over these are the classes you've taken this is what you have this is how it shifts I do see a lot of students um you know shifting from say Marine Sci
ence to Environmental Studies or vice versa as they kind of decide which you know do they which pathway they want to go um and we many of them are still able to graduate in a timely manner um so it's a little bit of what have you done which way are you going and also when you make these decisions um and kind of a similar question but um do you have a lot of students who double major either within or outside of the school of marine and atmospheric sciences I think that's I don't know if I'd say a
lot but I I see it quite regularly again students that are you know have have broad interests um and exemplary students who can kind of take take on quite a bit they will often double major double major with a minor as well and again with careful planning that that can that could be fairly straightforward again meeting with all of your major advisors with Nancy black setting up your four years and getting a plan many of the as we said many of the the foundational courses the SPC courses especia
lly you know they translate to any major um so you can fulfill those requirements um um yeah so so yeah I think Tara do you have much more experience with this but not uncommon we do have I have quite a few students that are double majored within one of the Somas fields we have you know I one of my students is in Environmental Studies major she's graduating but she's also graduating with a degree in studio Arts so they can be both within ours and also you know well outside in her case she combin
ed it so her final art project is all based on diving so that's what her art was you know based around so many of them incorporate different elements of this um again it does take planning to make sure you're if you're really especially if you're focused on doing it in you know simply a four-year period um but it can be managed I've had several students who started out with a major and minor and decided along the way that they loved the minor enough that they wanted to make that into a second ma
jor and again that often Works quite smoothly um you know depending on what they've taken and where they are in their path well I want to be the first to thank Kurt and Tara for such uh engaging presentation I'm sure everyone of our guests learned so much um as I mentioned at the beginning of the session the uh recording will be available later this week on the Stony Brook University admissions YouTube page so and I posted the link in the chat um we hope everyone who is first you know kind of ex
ploring Somas continues to do so we'll have all kinds of additional programming in the fall semester campus tours for the summer will also be posted in the next few weeks and for those of you who have been accepted and are making your final College decision we really hope you'll join us um you know at Stony Brook in the fall good luck with your decisions congratulations on your admission and we hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day thanks everybody bye-bye bye
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