All students accepted into the doctoral program must have received a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in geosciences or a related field prior to enrolling and must complete a minimum of sixty semester hours beyond the bachelor’s degree (including twelve hours of dissertation) for the Ph.D. degree. For the Ph.D. degree, at least 24 semester hours of the 60 graded course hours of credit must be earned from 5000-level courses in the Geosciences Department, excluding GEO 6V99 Dissertation, as part of the graduate program. The student’s Advisory Committee shall consider his/her past course work and determine the courses needed for this degree. There is no foreign language requirement. All students are required to pass a preliminary examination during their second semester of residence. The dissertation must be completed with a minimum of two first-authored papers published in refereed journals approved by the student’s committee. All students must enroll in GEO 5050 Geology Technical Sessions each semester that he/she is in residence, and must enroll in the GEO 5222 Grant Writing for Physical and Biological Sciences during the first fall semester of their residence. For further details, see the section on doctoral degrees in the General Information section of this catalog. The student may not take more than 10 hours of GEO 5V90 Special Problems in Geology except with approval of their dissertation committee.

Funding Opportunities

Funding opportunities for graduate students include Graduate Assistantships, either as a Graduate Teaching Assistant or a Graduate Research Assistant, Applied Petroleum Studies Fellowships (M.S.) and the Geology Alumni Graduate Scholarship (M.S.), the Glorietta Scholarship, and Wendlandt Scholarships.