My name is Dr Stuart Downward, from the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment.
I’m a lecturer in the School, my own personal area is in Water Resources Management.
But I’m gonna tell you a little bit about the School and about our courses, a little
bit about being a student in our course at University.
The School of Geography, Geology and the Environment is an umbrella for five different subject
areas, and those areas are; Geography, Geology, Hazards and Disaster Management, GIS and Environmental
Science and Sustainable Development.
And what unites us all is really an appreciation of the study of the Earth, understanding how
the earth operates, and the interaction of different physical human social political
systems.
Let me tell you something about being a student in the School of Geography, Geology and the
Environment our world is all around us, so there’s no better way to learn than to get
out into the field and to learn firsthand from our world around us.
But what’s important is that we can map those experiences onto the theoretical knowledge
and the skills knowledge that we acquire through our lectures and our practical as well.
So over the duration of your course, you will have exposure to a number of different learning
methods and different ways of trying to acquire information to process information and to
try and synthesise this information.
Our courses run for three years, with the exception of our Environment and Sustainable
Development courses where in fact you can take an optional sandwich year between your
second and third year.
So you have the ability, if you want in those courses to take a year out and to study in
the work place, working essentially as an employee of a company and then coming back
with that knowledge into your final year.
The learning experience through the three years is very incremental.
The first year is very much a platform to understand the basics, the fundamental of
how our earth operates in your particular subject discipline.
And in the third year you can then begin to really apply that knowledge to think about,
how that knowledge of the world around us then can be applied in a real world setting
and of course if you can then blend that with examples from field work and the practical
work that you would do, that’s gonna give you a fantastic skill set, that’s gonna
prepare you, for your chosen careers.
You will also learn in different ways, some of the ways you would learn, will be formal
teaching, as to say in a lecture theatre, learning from the lecturer and you will also
undertake an independent research project you will start this at the end of your second
year, in fact we’ll train you through your second year, into the process of how to undertake
independent research, and then you will work with us over the summer, between your second
and third year into your third year, producing your final dissertation, that you submit around
Easter of your last year and this is fantastic because this really gives you the opportunity
to choose an area of personal interest, to specialise in to develop the data, to process
that data and to produce a fantastic report you can be really proud of our courses are
very, very skills rich, we believe that an employer would want to see a graduate from
our school coming to their, coming to a particular job with a skill set that they can use we
use a range of different field work environments and let’s start with our local environment
in the UK.
We are in London, we are on the edge of London and so we’ve got the best of both worlds.
We’ve got the city on one side and we get everything a city has so we can go and we
can explore patterns of urbanisation development.
But equally we can go to the south downs to the north downs at our door step and we can
explore our local environments, the rocks the geology, the wheel in anticline the rivers
that flow through our landscape.
Listing where your degree is gonna take you, a lot of people ask me, what do graduates
from your School of Geography, Geology and the Environment do and go on to do?
Well, it depends very much on the subject area you’ve studied.
As a Geologist, clearly the different areas of geological work that are open to you.
As a Geographer, you’ve got a range of skill sets, some of you may have specialised in
physical or submarine human geography, so anything from town planning to environmental
management these are often jobs where we find our graduates now in employment.
As a GIS student, you’ve got a fantastic range of skills, technical skills, which are
highly valuable in a work place.
As a Hazards and Disaster Management student, you’ve got very specific skills, and many
of these students are targeting specific jobs in disaster management teams.
And as an environment or sustainable development student, clearly every day there’s something
about the environment in the news and you can imagine in a way which environmental skills
set that you have as a graduate are really, really valued in the work place today.
So your opportunities for employment are absolutely fantastic at the moment, I could not think
of a better time to study in our school.
Hi my name’s Harriet and I’m in my second year of studying Geography here.
I chose my course here at Kingston, because Geography was a subject, I’ve always enjoyed
studying it at school.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do as career so speaking to my teachers and
careers advisors I decided to carry on with something that I really loved and it’s such
a core subject that it’s opened up so many doors for me as well, whilst I’ve been here.
Once you think about the course here at Kingston is we get to go on quite a few field trips,
to lots of different places, we are off to Malta soon and then next year on our third
year, we’ve got the option to go to places like Morocco or South Africa and some of our
students go to Australia as well.
What I enjoy the most about my course here is there’s a broad range of topics to choose
from to study so whether you’re more interested in Physical Geography or Human Geography,
you can pick modules that relate to either of those, or if you want to mix it up you
can do a bit of both, and your degree program works out from there depending on what modules
you want to choose and what subjects you want to study.
There is a lot of coursework assessment in our field, we do exams as well and then there’s
also some practicals and field work assessments as well, where we go out in the field and
actually do some work and we might have to write reports and things like that.
One of the biggest challenges, when I came to Kingston was writing my first essay and
I’ve been out of school for a year, I’ve taken a year out before coming to University
so when we first were set an essay, that was a big challenge to get back into writing that,
but it also helped speaking to tutors and the academic skills centre they really helped
me out to get back on track and really do well with it.