Undergrad advantages/disadvantages? Marine Biology or Oceanography?

[ImperiousRex]

I've posted this question on other forums, but haven't heard anything and thought i'd give it a shot here. Well right now i'm doing an undergrad in Economics, but i was going to switch to something Liberal Arts because it's easier, and i've been in school for WAY too long. I've always wanted to go into Marine Biology, but I don't fully understand what specialties are in this field. I have heard that there is a lot of money to be made from research and grants and what not but my main objective is to do something that I like. Now of course money is a must as well, basically something i can be comfortable with.

Either way, what would the disadvantages be of getting an undergrad in something Liberal Arts to then try and further my education in grad school in Marine Biology? What are the possibilities of getting into a grad school for this? Have any of you been through this? Any tips

Also, I want to get a job in the ocean working with and around marine life. Acquiring and studying specimens, studying the marine animal and plant life, testing water for organisms or pollution etc... What types of specializations are there in the major for this and what is the best paying specialization for this type of degree or for oceanography?

Does anyone know of other Marine Biology type forums? The ones i know of now are planktonforums.org, oceanographers.net and this one but the first two i don't really get any traffic i guess.

Thanks

 

[Sprocket]

I'm currently a PhD student in an Evolutionary Biology/Marine Science lab, however I work primarily on terrestrial vertebrates.

First and foremost, forget it if you are focused on the financial side of things, especially in terms of an academic career. The educational expectations mean you will be on a scholarship for a 5-6 years, then a postdoc salary of around $40k for another three, and only then will you be qualified to apply for major grants from the NSF etc. At all stages, competition is high, you may have to apply several times and even then may not be successful. Pretty much anything else will get you more renumeration and security frot he input of time expected of you, with the exception of scuba instructing, prehaps.

Basically, unless you have a passionate interest in research and the naunces to make the necesary academic achievements required, forget academia.

However, enviromental consultancy in the private sector is a potential avenue. Many people I know are involved in consultancy for development and mining. There's ethical concerns I wouldn't be comfortable with, but the time you spend in the field is high and the pay is very reasonable. At least in Australia, a good BSc is the academic requirement, in combination with experience (usually through summer work experience type activity) and the willingness to go where they want you, which for a graduate will probably be where no one else wants to (i.e. midle of nowhere)

As for doing that sort of work with a marine focus, you'd be expected to have commercial scuba certification and I imagine the competition is stiff.

If you're really keen on money and diving, I'd be looking at engineering. Got a friend who works on oil rigs and earns bucketloads of cash, however he has a military clearance diver background - and got a Mech Engineeering degree through the military.

Unfortunately, people are keen to dive for free (I regularly go along on marine field trips on no pay no cost arrangements) and most "fun" research isn't industry driven, so money is from government and therefore higly sought after.

 

[adurso]

See this site for info : Page Not Found? - MarineBio.org

And read Milt Love's info : Marine Biologist

Unless your liberal arts undergrad is heavy on the sciences, you will have a difficult time qualifiying for grad school in marine bio

 

[Thalassamania]

I'm sorry - Milt's stuff is so good it has to be replicated here. Please make note of reason three!

So you want to be a marine biologist? Well sonny, or sonnette, as the case may be, why don’t you just sit down and let a real marine biologist give you some damn good advice. And wipe that smirk off your face, sit up straight and for goodness sakes stop fidgeting! You’d think you had lice the way you are carrying on. You do? Oh well, never mind.

​

First of all there are three really, really bad reasons to want to be a marine biologist. If you have even an inkling that these are yours, please run away as fast as possible, ‘cause neither you nor we will be happy.

​

Three Really, Really Bad Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist ​

Reason Number One: "I want to be a marine biologist so that I can talk to dolphins."

Believing this is simply the Kiss of Death. This is the verbal equivalent of reaching down your throat, pulling out your own intestines, wrapping them around your neck and choking yourself. When we hear this our impulse is to thwack you a good one on your keester with the frozen haddock we keep within arm’s reach just for this occasion.

​

And why is that? It is because, and please listen carefully, while you may want to talk to dolphins, dolphins do not want to talk to you. That’s right. Mostly, dolphins want to eat fishes and have sex with other dolphins. And that pretty much cuts you out of the loop, doesn’t it? Oh, I know that there are the occasional dolphins that hang around beaches, swim with humans and seem to be chummy, but these are the exceptions. You don’t judge the whole human race by the people who attend monster car rallies, do you?

​

Just be honest with yourself. If you want to talk to dolphins you don’t want to be a biologist. What you really want to do is explore your past lives, get in touch with the Cosmic Oneness and conduct similar-minded individuals on tours to Central America looking for evidence that We Are Not Alone. Our experience is that people who feel this way last about 6.5 minutes in any biology program.​

Reason Number Two: "I want to be a marine biologist because I really like Jacques Cousteau."

That’s nice. We really like Jacques Cousteau, too. But, drinking thousands of gallons of red wine while scuba diving around the world does not make you a marine biologist. It makes you a wonderful and effective spokesperson for the sea, and gives you a liver with the consistency of a chocolate necco wafer, but it does not make you a marine biologist.

​

Reason Number Three: "I want to be a marine biologist because I want to make big bucks."

Okay, here’s the bottom line. By Federal law, marine biologists have to take a vow of poverty and chastity. Poverty, because you are not going to make squat-j-doodly in this job. Just how squat is the doodly we are talking about? Well, five years after finishing my PhD I was making slightly less than a beginning manager at McDonalds. Ooh, a 36 year old guy with 13 years of college and 5 years of post-doctoral experience making just about as much as a semi-literate 19 year old with pimples the size of Bolivia, who can speak perhaps 3 words at a time before the term "you know" enters the conversation.​

And chastity because, well, who’s going to date a marine biologist? The smell alone tends to dissuade a large proportion of the opposite sex.​

Two Really, Really Good Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist
​

Reason Number One: "You can dress and act almost any way you want."

This is true. Marine biologists are almost entirely free of any of those silly restrictions that blight the professional landscape of our fellow proletarians. This is because no one really cares about what we do or what we say. You want to come to work dressed in scabrous khaki shorts and a torn black Sandman shirt? Fine. You want to grow a scruffy beard, get a tattoo of a gooseneck barnacle on your arm or burp at inopportune moments? No problem, just do good work.​

Reason Number Two: "If you like it, just do it."

Look, the reality is that you only go around once in life and if, by chance, you do come back, knowing how you have behaved in this life, you will undoubtedly come back as a slime mold. And most slime molds cannot be marine biologists. So just go out there and do what you enjoy. Marine biology is a wonderful profession. You want to find cancer cures by grinding up sponges? How about figuring out why hammerhead sharks always come back to the same seamount? Or where is the missing carbon dioxide that industries are producing; could the ocean be soaking it up? All neat projects. But pay attention here. None of this involves drinking copious quantities of fermented grape juice, while intoning "The ocean, she is strange and wondrous, filled with animals that disturb even a Frenchman."

​

The ocean is an exciting, never-dull place that is perfect for piddling away your existence. And just think, you actually get paid to think cool thoughts and do cool things.

​

And so what if you will never have sex again?​

 

[adurso]

When my daughter first expressed an interest in marine biology I had her read Milt's stuff and think long and hard about it. Then as time went by I had her read it again periodically to see if her interest had changed.

 

[archman]

First, let me totally support Thal's forward. It's spot-on.

My own (extensive) marine science training has see-sawed quite a bit between marine biology and oceanography. I have observed that the differences between the two disciplines can be rather significant. To sum the differences up into a single sentence, marine biology is heavy in er... biology, and oceanography is heavy into physical sciences and math with far less biology. I'm being rather generalistic and many schools and labs often deviate from the formalities. Marine biology is *supposed* to be the study of organisms in the marine environment, while oceanography is *supposed* to focus on the study of marine environments. There's a subfield of oceanography called biological oceanography that blends a lot more into marine biology.

I would have once agreed with adurso's statement that an undergraduate degree heavy in the sciences is almost obligate for acceptance into a marine biology graduate program. But now that I've been out amongst a few colleges and sampled their graduate student backgrounds, I can reliably state that many marine bio and even oceanography grad programs do not require extensive science background from their students. Not anymore, anyway. A liberal arts degree in *whatever* is just fine.

Less than 5% of the "I wanna be a marine biologist" high school students I've supervised in the Caribbean have actually pursued careers in the field. That's a nasty statistic.

Another nasty observation. "Marine biology" graduate (and undergraduate) programs have sprouted up at colleges all over the place within the last 10-12 years. This has created a false impression (to many student applicants) that jobs in marine biology are on the rise. I can assure you that they most certainly are not. Even technician-level positions are fairly rare. Tons of temporary, unpaid "internships" however. If anyone wants to be hooked up with one of these, I can forward half a dozen weblinks!

 

[Thalassamania]

First a word about marine biology and oceanography, and I say this a a Biological Oceanographer not a Marine Biologist.

Most (not all) Marine Biologists are specialists, they study things that live in the sea, some know a great deal about many other areas of ocean science, but many can't tell a Nansen Bottle from a Coke Bottle, could care less what a CTD is, have never heard on an XBT, couldn't run a Winkler Titration if their life depended on it, have no interest in Pillow Basalts and think that Potential Density is how many people could live somewhere sometime in the future. Most (not all) Oceanographers are generalists, they have similar blind spots, only they are less amusing because they tend to be down in the minutia that no one except a specialist really cares about anyway.

I am a biologist at heart, but I am also expected to be conversant at a fairly high level with physical, chemical and geological topics. I'm supposed to be the marine science equivalent to a utility infielder, best at one base or shortstop but capable of playing any of the four positions. Note that this approach does varry from school to school and that there has been a tendency lately to soften the amount of biological material that the Physical Oceanographers have to master and to soft pedal the Physics and Fluid Dynamics for the Biologists (many of whom just can't handle the math).

That said, I think that undergrad oceanography programs are poor choices, because you never really get the chance to establish a strong backround in a single major field; by the same token undergraduate Marine Biology programs tend to force too much specialization at at time when the student should be working toward a more generalist understanding of evolution, niche theory, ecoloical models, animal behavior, etc. I say, for either approach, get a good math, statistic and experimental design backround and let the rest take care of itself, but know which direction: generalist or specialist you are headed in.

 

[Sprocket]

Stuff

Indeed.

I'm a phylogeographer (type of population geneticist) and systematist. This requires quite specialist knowledge in genetic/coalescent theory and lab work, but also generalistic knowledge of all factors that might affect the population structure of a given study organism or group.

Although my disseration focuses on arid zone reptiles, a pet subject of mine is population structure in marine systems - what factors cause population structure and speciation in marine enviroments? In order to have any hope of developing and testing credible hypotheses for those sorts of questions, you need to make sense of oceanography, atmospheric science, geology, biology, ecology etc as well as interpreting genetic info.

However a big and exponenitally growing need is the ability to use statistical testing and simulation modelling. Both of these require a pretty solid grasp of maths and computing. I'm trying to learn Perl Script at the moment to pipeline analysis for genomic sequencing, and I just filled 3 terrabytes up with sequence data. Would've been at a distinct advangtage had I done some basic programming in undergrad.

 

[Thalassamania]

Good advice, very good. When I was an undergrad, since I spoke fair Spanish, they let me take a year of FORTRAN (now am I dating myself?) instead of a foreign language, best move I ever made. The courses I took in Exploratory Data Analysis were likely the most useful graduate courses I took.

Science hobbies are a must - I have a long standing interest in reptilian/avian evolution.

 

[archman]

That said, I think that undergrad oceanography programs are poor choices, because you never really get the chance to establish a strong backround in a single major field; by the same token undergraduate Marine Biology programs tend to force too much specialization at at time when the student should be working toward a more generalist understanding of evolution, niche theory, ecoloical models, animal behavior, etc. I say, for either approach, get a good math, statistic and experimental design backround and let the rest take care of itself, but know which direction: generalist or specialist you are headed in.

While I was still in graduate school, I would have agreed about the specialization of marine bio majors. But that impression would have been based off of 1990's and earlier higher education trends. Now that I'm out of school and in the trenches of teaching today's students, I'm seeing a vastly different picture.

From what I've been recently observing and hearing about from other biology instructors throughout the U.S., many if not most "marine biology" majors lack much specialization at all. In fact (at state-funded schools in particular), if one now peruses a marine biology degree plan, I'd lay strong odds that there are less than five dedicated marine bio specialty classes that a given marine bio undergrad would need to take to graduate. Most schools simply don't offer more than this, and if they could, the general education requirements for state-funded colleges are increasingly supplanting advanced core major courses.

Several schools (still) offer outstanding marine biology (or "biology" with strong marine science) programs. Most of these are the classic institutions strongly affiliated with marine labs. Some are newer schools. Regardless, the only SUREFIRE way that I know of to check the quality and quantity of his field is to get a copy of the university's course catalog and student handbook. At the minimum, check the following:
1. Degree Plan (see how many marine biology or related classes are required)
2. Course Catalog (see what's offered and more importantly, how often they're offered)
3. Faculty Listing (see how many professors there are that are teaching courses in the field)

From my experience, the vast majority of my college students (nor their parents) paid much (if any) attention to degree requirements or course listings when selecting colleges to attend. Given that most students nowadays don't select majors until their junior years (or later), I understand this lack of interest. But I do not endorse it.