History and Overview

The School of Natural Resources and Environment offers a Bachelor of Science degree in environmental science, with tracks in environmental science and natural resource management, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in environmental science with tracks in environmental education, environmental policy, and environmental policy and business.

The mission of the school is to develop leaders with essential knowledge and mental discipline to continue individual growth and to integrate thinking about natural and social systems. These leaders will be able to face challenges in natural resources and the environment with imagination and ingenuity.

The school’s degree tracks are science-based, multidisciplinary and academically rigorous. The curriculum spans the range of human knowledge needed to solve complex environmental problems not amenable to narrowly based solutions.

It offers access to 235 courses taught in 56 departments, uniting much of the university’s academic programs in a future-oriented liberal science. The curriculum combines the basic and applied sciences needed to diagnose problems, the engineering needed to devise solutions and the social sciences of human processes and institutions needed to take action. The degree does not replace the more specialized degrees offered in the university’s departments of engineering, life sciences and social sciences.

The school operates horizontally across UF’s structure of academic disciplines. The School has no faculty or departments of its own. Instead, participating faculty are in existing discipline-centered departments in other colleges. Approximately 280 members of the university’s faculty in 49 departments of 11 other colleges are formally affiliated with the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

The baccalaureate degree in environmental science prepares graduates to enter the diverse and vigorous environmental job market or to advance to a graduate degree program in anthropology, botany, entomology and nematology, environmental engineering, fisheries, forestry, political science, resource economics, soil and water science, wildlife or zoology, or to a professional degree program in architecture, business, education, journalism or law.

Students interested in environmental science should prepare by meeting the pre-professional requirements. Students seeking to become registered professional engineers in environmental engineering sciences, however, should instead follow the pre-professional requirements of that department. Those students unsure about becoming engineers should make curricular selections that maintain their options until they make a firm decision.

Students seeking the maximum depth of scholarship available in a more specialized or traditional environment-oriented discipline in another college are encouraged to major in the appropriate discipline-centered department rather than the School of Natural Resources and Environment.