PhD in Geography at Pennsylvania State University

The faculty encourages graduate students to arrange courses of study appropriate to their individual needs and aspirations. Programs in Geography may be directed toward a career in public service, teaching and research, private industry, or one of the many other vocational opportunities open to geographers.

Students typically concentrate their study on topics that fall within the special skills and interests of the faculty. Current specialties include biogeography; cartography; climatology; cultural geography; development studies; economic geography; environmental governance; feminist geography; geo-computation; geographic education; geographic information science; geographic theory; geographic visualization; health geography; human dimensions of global change; landscape ecology; nature and society; political ecology; political geography; population geography; remote sensing; and urban geography.

Our department is organized around the following research clusters: spatial modeling and remote sensing; geospatial big data analytics; environmental change and prediction; justice, ethics, and diversity; population, environment, and governance; and food security and human health.

1. Know: Graduates will demonstrate knowledge of the core theories and methods in geography as well as deeper knowledge of three out of four subfields. Graduates will demonstrate specialized knowledge within their chosen sub-field: Human Geography, Environment-Society, Physical Geography, or Geographic Information Science.
2. Create: Graduates will be able to creatively synthesize theory and literature within their field of specialization. They will be able to generate new ideas and if appropriate formulate hypotheses in geographic knowledge. Graduates will be able to select from a range of methodological options and create a research framework to provide solutions to geographical problems.
3. Apply: Graduates will be able to carry out independent, original, and ethical research that addresses problems in the subfields of geography.
4. Critical thinking: Graduates will be able to critically analyze work in their field of specialization.
5. Communicate: Graduates will be able to convey ideas or arguments in a professional manner with clear, concise, well-organized papers, proposals, and oral presentations.