Undergraduate

Overview

A wider world

All societies rely on relationships with each other and the physical environment. Increasingly these are fragile interdependences presenting intellectual and practical challenges. Our Geography course tackles these issues from a broad base, but also allows you to specialise.

Facilities and resources

We have one of the UK's largest geography libraries, containing around 17,000 books, journals and periodicals, and the Scott Polar Research Institute is an integral part of the Department. There are extensive computing resources, where you receive formal teaching in geographical information technology including geographical information systems and remote sensing, and the Department's intranet provides further online resources.

Fieldwork and travel

Fieldwork is an important part of our course and there are several one-day excursions and field trips in Years 1 and 2. A compulsory field class in Part IB leads to a piece of assessed practical work. Recent locations include Switzerland, Dublin, Berlin, Morocco and Mallorca. Some financial help is available but students are required to contribute to the cost of these field trips.

Your Part II dissertation requires basic research in the summer vacation at the end of your second year. Dissertation subjects and locations vary widely: some students travel abroad, others stay in the British Isles.

Many students organise their own overseas expeditions, often with the Cambridge University Expeditions Society. Some Department and College travel awards are available for this.

Careers

While Geography isn't directly a 'vocational' degree, Cambridge Geography graduates are trained to deal with multivariate problems, are skilled in information retrieval, data management and computing, and are used to working on their own initiative, and as such are highly employable in a variety of professions.

Our graduates enter many different careers, including industry and commerce, planning, teaching, finance, social work, environmental management and conservation, the media, politics, and the Civil Service.

Course outline

You typically have six to eight lectures each week (with associated reading). You normally have three supervisions a fortnight at which you discuss a topic, usually following preparatory reading and essay writing. In the first and second years, you also have laboratory or practical classes, and field classes.

Entry requirements

Typical offers require
A Level: A*AA
IB: 40-41 points, with 776 at Higher Level
For other qualifications, see our main Entrance requirements pages.

Further Resources

Find out more about Geography at Cambridge

• Course website - Explore Geography in more detail on the course website.
• Course guide - A detailed guide to the Geography degree.
• Course FAQ - Some frequently asked questions about the Geography course can be found on the Course Guide page.
• Facilities - Some information about the facilities available to Geography students can be found on the Course Guide page.

Tools to help you with your Geography application

• Geography and your College choice - Information about College admissions and teaching can be found on the Course Guide page.

Geography and your future

• Career opportunities - Information about the careers opportunities available to you after studying Geography at Cambridge can be found on the Course Guide page.

The student experience

• Student profiles - Some current students describe their experience of studying Geography.
• CUGS – the student society - Find out more about the Cambridge University Geographical Society and what they get up to.

Unistats info

Contextual Information

From September 2012, every undergraduate course of more than one year's duration will have a Key Information Set (KIS). The KIS allows you to compare 17 pieces of information about individual courses at different higher education institutions.

However, please note that superficially similar courses often have very different structures and objectives, and that the teaching, support and learning environment that best suits you can only be determined by identifying your own interests, needs, expectations and goals, and comparing them with detailed institution- and course-specific information.

We recommend that you look thoroughly at the course and University information contained on these webpages and consider coming to visit us on an Open Day, rather than relying solely on statistical comparison.

You may find the following notes helpful when considering information presented by the KIS.

1. The KIS relies on superficially similar courses being coded in the same way. Whilst this works on one level, it leads to some anomalies. For example, Music courses and Music Technology courses can have exactly the same code despite being very different programmes with quite distinct educational and career outcomes.
   
   Any course which combines several disciplines (as many courses at Cambridge do) tends to be compared nationally with courses in just one of those disciplines, and in such cases a KIS comparison may not be an accurate or fair reflection of the reality of either. For example, you may find that when considering a degree which embraces a range of disciplines such as biology, physics, chemistry and geology (for instance, Natural Sciences at Cambridge), the comparison provided is with courses at other institutions that primarily focus on just one (or a smaller combination) of those subjects.


2. Whilst the KIS makes reference to some broad types of financial support offered by institutions, it cannot compare packages offered by different institutions. Different students have different circumstances and requirements, and you should weigh up what matters to you most: level of fee; fee waivers; means-tested support such as bursaries; non-means-tested support such as academic scholarships and study grants; and living costs such as accommodation, travel.


3. The KIS provides a typical cost of private (ie non-university) accommodation. This is very difficult to estimate as prices and properties vary. University accommodation can be substantially cheaper, and if you are likely to live in College for much or all of the duration of your course (as is the case at Cambridge), then the cost of private accommodation will be of less or no relevance for you. The KIS also provides the typical annual cost of university accommodation and the number of beds available. Note that since most universities offer a range of residential accommodation, you should check with institutions about the likelihood of securing a room at a price that suits your budget. Knowing the number of beds available is not necessarily useful: it may be much more important to find out if all students are guaranteed accommodation.


4. Time in lectures, seminars and similar can vary enormously by institution depending on the structure of the course, and the quality of such contact time should be the primary consideration.


5. Whilst starting salaries can be a useful measure, they do not give any sense of career trajectory or take account of the voluntary/low paid work that many graduates undertake initially in order to gain valuable experience necessary/advantageous for later career progression.

The above list is not exhaustive and there may be other important factors that are relevant to the choices that you are making, but we hope that this will be a useful starting point to help you delve deeper than the face value of the KIS data.