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Requirements for the MS Degree

The Master of Science in Geological Sciences is usually considered the entry-level degree sought by students interested in a professional career in geology. Many MS-degree recipients find employment in the oil and gas industry, with companies devoted to solutions of environmental quality and engineering problems, and with state or federal government agencies. Others use the MS degree as a basis for careers in secondary education or as geologic consultants. The degree forms a solid foundation for those who continue with the PhD program.

The MS degree at UT is a broad, thesis-based degree designed to round-out fundamental education in geological sciences. Students enrolled in the masters program are expected to take courses in diverse areas in order to avoid becoming too narrowly focused, thereby limiting choices in future employment and further education. Towards this goal, the Department has established five general groups (see below). As part of the required course work, all masters students are expected to select a minimum of one course from at least three of these groups. Exceptions to this rule will be considered but must be approved by your faculty degree committee and the Graduate Program Committee. A major goal of the UTK program is for the MS student to get a taste of each field while concentrating in one. The MS thesis serves as an introduction to original research in some aspect of geological sciences, and the research is conducted with the guidance of a faculty advisor and, in every case, should produce results of publishable quality. Every student is strongly encouraged to publish his/her thesis in a refereed scientific journal.

Timetable for MS

The timetable for completion of the MS-degree requirements usually spans two to two and a half calendar years. Some students are able to finish earlier, while others require more time. During the first semester, your temporary advisor will advise you in planning your course of study. During the second semester, the student chooses a thesis advisor and establishes a thesis committee. Field and analytical work on the thesis are ordinarily conducted during the summer semester, although course work may be arranged so that field work is conducted during the winter and early springthe best time for work in the southern and central Appalachians. During the third semester, the student generally completes necessary course work while continuing thesis research, and the fourth semester is generally devoted to completion of the thesis research, writing, and defense of the thesis.

Many students find it necessary to complete the thesis during the second summer. Others require more time to complete the degree requirements because of the nature of the research, financial needs, or other factors. The Graduate School has established a time limit of six calendar years for completion of the MS degree. If you are delayed in completion of your degree because of extraordinary circumstances, you may petition the department and The Graduate School for an extension beyond this time frame. Your committee and the departmental faculty will consider your progress toward the degree up to the time of the petition in making their decision. If the departmental faculty approves your petition, The Graduate School may require documentation concerning course work over six years old, or may require you to take additional courses, if some of your course work is no longer considered to be up-to-date.

Prerequisites

Successful completion of the MS degree program in geological sciences depends on a solid background in physical and biological sciences and mathematics. In addition, the equivalent background of a bachelor's degree in geology is normally required, although your undergraduate major neednot have been geology. The minimum geology background can be demonstrated by attaining the 50th percentile in the Advanced GRE in Geology. Non-traditional students do not have a degree in geology and include those students with degrees in biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, etc. In most cases, they will have corresponded with a particular faculty member who will become a temporary advisor, prior to enrolling in the Department. Immediately upon the student's arrival, an ad hoc committee of three faculty, including the temporary advisor, will be appointed by the Graduate Program Committee (GPC). The duties of this ad hoc committee will be to review and evaluate the prior course work of the new student and to design a course program that addresses deficiencies in geology, cognate sciences, and math. This program proposal, including appropriate explanations, will be presented to the GPC within the first week of the first semester of the student's enrollment. The GPC will either approve this proposal or immediately work out any disagreements with the ad hoc committee. However, where this cannot be done, the final decision lies with the entire Departmental faculty. At the end of this procedure, the ad hoc committee will be disbanded.

The non-traditional graduate student is usually granted additional financial support in order to make up deficiencies, 1 semester for MS, 2 semesters for PhD. The course work deficiency program that the ad hoc committee approves often includes three of the following geology core courses, taken for credit and passed with a grade of B or better: Mineralogy (310), Paleobiology (320), Igneous & Metamorphic Petrology (330), Stratigraphy and Sedimentology (340), and Structural Geology (370). In addition, a field experience, such as Field Geology (440), is also required, which may be completed in the summer. All these courses should be taken as early in the student's career as feasible.

The equivalent of a summer field geology course is required. Field experience in which the student collects and interprets field geological, geophysical, hydrogeological, or occasionally biological data may be acceptable substitutes for a formal summer field camp. The field camp course may not be taken for graduate credit.

Cognate courses required are one year of calculus, one year of chemistry, and one year of either physics or biological science. Students lacking some of these requirements may be admitted, but deficiencies must be removed within the first year. Deficiencies are considered to be removed by attaining a grade of B in the equivalent undergraduate geology courses or a grade of C in the cognate courses. Grades received in undergraduate courses taken to remove deficiencies will not affect your graduate grade point average (GPA).

Upon arrival at UTK, the DGS will inform you of any courses you might need to remove deficiencies. Any entrance requirement may be varied or waived by appeal to the GPC. Successful appeals will take into account a student's background in equivalent courses or work experiences. If you believe that a prerequisite is satisfied by your background or pertinent experience, you may petition the GPC to substitute the experience for the equivalent course work. Consult the DGS, or your advisor, if you think this may apply to you. For example, some students have acted as summer field assistants for the U.S. Geological Survey; this might substitute for a formal course in field geology.

Course Requirements

The Graduate School requires a minimum of 30 semester hours of graduate course work. Six of the 30 must be thesis (Geology 500); the remainder must be formal courses, seminars, or independent study. Two-thirds of all graduate hours must be taken at the 500-level or above, but only six hours of Geology 500 may count in this total. The remaining one-third may be 400-level courses. To apply this rule, take all your hours of course work and add six hours of thesis. Most students have no difficulty satisfying this rule.

A full load is considered to be nine to 12 credit hours. The maximum load is 15 hours, although a student with a cumulative GPA 3.6 may petition The Graduate School to be allowed to take up to 18 hours. Graduate students in geological sciences usually carry the normal full load. Because of the demands of graduate courses, it is rare for a student to take more than 12 to 13 hours.

The Department of Geological Sciences imposes some distribution requirements on the 24 minimum, non-thesis, graduate hours taken by MS students. Sixteen of these hours must be geology courses. The other eight may be geology courses or may include courses taken for graduate credit in other departments. Of these 24 hours, 14 must be numbered above 500. You must take at least one course from three of the five groups listed in Table 1. This provides exposure to a variety of approaches to geological problems.

Distribution Requirements

  • Group 1: Mineralogy, Petrology, Geochemistry 410, 460, 475, 480, 530, 563, 565, 568
  • Group 2: Stratigraphy, Paleontology, Sedimentology, and Quaternary Geology 420, 421, 450, 545, 550, 556, 557
  • Group 3: Structural Geology, Tectonics, and Geophysics 470, 471, 505, 540, 570, 572, 575, 576
  • Group 4: Environmental Geology, Hydrogeology, and Low-Temperature Geochemistry 401, 455, 485, 510, 521, 535, 585, 586
  • Group 5: Allied Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering Any 400- or 500-level courses with graduate credit from related departments
  • Questions about the group assignment for courses not listed (which are usually new courses), should be directed to the DGS.
  • You must register for Geology 595, Selected Topics in Geology, during your first two years. This course is a departmental seminar held on Thursday afternoons where faculty, students, and guests present lectures about current research in geology. You will have an opportunity to participate in this series of lectures. Consult the section on Selected Topics in Geology for details.
  • The course requirements listed above constitute the minimum. You may take additional courses necessary for your studies or to simply satisfy your curiosity. Keep in mind, however, that two-thirds of your graduate courses, including only six hours of Geology 500, are required to be at or above the 500 level. Refer to the checklist of minimum MS requirements in the appendix.

Admission to Candidacy

An MS-degree student must be admitted to candidacy no later than the semester prior to completion of degree requirements. To be admitted to candidacy, obtain a yellow Admission to Candidacy application form from the Office of Graduate Admissions and Records (218 Student Services Building). To be admitted to candidacy, you must have completed at least 10 graduate hours of course work, have a GPA of at least 3.0 (B), and have removed any deficiencies in prerequisites. Fill out the form with a list of the courses you have taken, the grades received, and the courses you plan to take. Obtain the necessary signatures and turn in the appropriate number of copies to the Office of Graduate Admissions and Records. The Graduate School will check to make sure all the requirements are satisfied and will return a copy to you. On the returned form, the Dean of The Graduate School will have indicated the date by which you must finish all requirements (six years after entering the program). Please inform the DGS of your change in status to candidacy so that your file can be updated.

Thesis Requirements

You choose your own advisor and members of your thesis committee. The committee minimally consists of three members, with the advisor as chairman. The student decides on a thesis topic and prepares a thesis proposal, usually five to ten pages in length, which describes the problem and the approach proposed to solve the problem. The student and his/her committee meet to discuss the proposal. When the proposal is satisfactory to the committee, the student submits the thesis proposal and an approval form (found in the appendix) signed by the advisor to the DGS. The GPC examines the proposal and the committee membership to ensure that the committee is appropriate for the thesis topic. Once the proposal is approved by the GPC, a copy is placed in your file in the department office.

Research on the thesis topic may begin as soon as the topic and committee have been approved by the GPC, usually at the end of the second semester. Much of the research will probably be done during the summer between the first and second years, but most students continue their research during the school year.

You are expected to make satisfactory progress toward completion of the thesis, with the progress being monitored by your committee. You and your committee should meet during the second year (at least each semester) to review the intermediate results, and to offer suggestions and encouragement. Failure to make satisfactory progress could result in the loss of financial aid or dismissal from the Graduate Program. These results are drastic and rare; most students complete their theses in a timely fashion.

The University requires that you enroll for thesis credit each semester in which thesis research is performed using University facilities and/or involving any faculty consultation including the summer semester. Although the minimum registration for thesis credits in the semester in which a student plans to graduate is three hours, students on graduate teaching assistantships normally should enroll for a full load of thesis hours (nine to 12 hours) during the summer.

The thesis constitutes the official report of the results of your research. The style in which it is written depends on the nature of the material and the journal for which it is intended. All students are encouraged to write the thesis in the format of a manuscript for journal publication. Additional data, background material, or description of procedures, which are not appropriate for journal publication, should be included as appendices in the thesis. In some cases, the thesis work may be published prior to the defense. In such cases, the student must be the first author for it to be acceptable as a thesis.

The thesis that is defended must be complete in every respect, including all text, maps, figures, tables, references, and appendices. The final format of the thesis must be approved by The Graduate School. Thesis consultants are available at The Graduate School office to help ensure that margins are the proper size, acceptable fonts are used, and so on. Theses prepared with reliable word-processing programs make editing and reformatting easy.

You must defend the thesis, even if you have already published it! If an entire thesis or chapter is to be submitted for publication, your committee should approve the thesis or chapter before it is submitted for review by the journal.

The dates by which the thesis defense must be scheduled and the thesis turned in to The Graduate School in final form are published each semester in The Graduate School News, posted on the Graduate Program bulletin board on the second floor of G & G Building. The student should submit the first draft of the thesis to the thesis advisor. When the advisor concludes that the thesis is acceptable, a revised draft is presented to the other thesis committee members for their comments and approval. The thesis committee must receive the thesis copy for review not less than two weeks prior to the anticipated date for the defense. This two-week prior submission rule is necessary to allow the thesis committee time to read and approve the thesis, the student to make changes, and a copy to be placed in the departmental office one week prior to the defense for review by the faculty. You must also post an announcement of the defense and an abstract of the thesis on the Graduate Program bulletin board on the second floor of G & G Building one week before the date of defense.

The oral defense of the thesis consists of two parts. The first is a 15- to 20-minute, public presentation of the results of the research. A question-and-answer period follows. The second is an examination, in private, by the thesis committee and other interested faculty members. The thesis committee decides whether or not the student has passed the defense. The thesis approval sheets are signed by the committee when the thesis is acceptable in final form.

You are required to supply two unbound copies of the final thesis to The Graduate School, one hardbound copy to the department, one to your advisor, usually hardbound, and one to each of the members of your thesis committee, if they request them, which may be softbound copies. The distribution of the copies is part of the requirements for the MS degree and arrangements are to be made prior to graduation.