Undergraduate Program

Undergraduate students may major or minor in geography at UNH. See the links at the right for all of the opportunities open to undergraduates.

What is geography?

Geography is the study of how and why things vary from place to place around the world. Geographers study the environment. They study the geography of human activity. They study places and all that makes them distinctive. They study how people interact with the natural world.

Geography is a multifaceted and inherently interdisciplinary field. It is an integrating discipline, drawing on knowledge from many other fields in order to understand geographic patterns and the character of individual places. Geography is also a way of looking at the world. Nearly any subject can be viewed through a geographic lens.

The Department of Geography at UNH is strongest in cultural, political, urban, historical, and environmental geography, climatology, and geotechniques. Individual faculty members possess regional specialties in New England, North America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Japan.

The geography major provides undergraduates with a solid foundation in geography while enabling them to develop a specialization in one of the three main areas of geography — human geography, environmental geography, and geotechniques. A geography degree will prepare students to pursue a wide variety of careers or enter graduate school.

UNH geography graduates have gone on to careers as teachers, geographic information systems analysts, pilots, environmental consultants, hurricane hunters, city planners, emergency medical physicians, meteorologists, land surveyors, real estate agents, sports psychologists, “Jeopardy” clue researchers, cartographers, marketing managers, financial portfolio strategists, transportation planners, social analysts, travel consultants, college professors, and more.