BY PATIENCE COLLIER, News Editor

The geography department will be offering a Bachelor of Science degree starting in fall quarter of 2015. The new degree will be offered alongside the Bachelor of Arts.

The Faculty Senate unanimously approved the new major on Jan. 8. The curriculum has been decided, meaning that students who wish to pursue the degree will be able to start working towards it by next quarter.

“This is going to be great for our program,” Megan Walsh, assistant professor of geography, said. “Half of us here are physical scientists… to be able to give our students the same thing is really important to us.”

The new degree program will focus on physical geography classes, rather than political geography.

According to Craig Revels, assistant professor of geography and chair of the curriculum committee for the geography department, the department took the opportunity to work on the entire department’s program.

“This is a way of taking our expertise and channeling into the two best career tracks.”

The curriculum committee for the geography department is a body made up of three people who handle the paperwork for curriculum proposals over the whole department.

Revels and the curriculum committee were tasked with thinking about how the department wanted to proceed with the new curriculum, including dealing with proposals and streamlining classrooms, Revels explained.

They were responsible for most of the paperwork concerning all the curriculum changes in the department, which would then be presented to the faculty overall, and then revised by the group based on feedback.

“Our task was… to come up with the proposals, work with the proposals, think about class structures, things like that,” Revels said. “Then we would present to the full faculty.”

The department faculty has been working on the curriculum for almost two years, and talking about getting the degree set up for over eight years, according to Revels.

Kevin Archer, dean of graduate studies and former interim dean of geography, told the Faculty Senate he had been surprised to find that Central only had a Bachelors of Arts in geography.

There had been different forms of encouragement for the new direction in the geography program, including a program evaluation report by Kirk Johnson, dean of the college of sciences, which Revels said indicated support of a more scientific direction in the geography department.

“There was administrative support for this over the years, and efforts from within the department over the years, and last year it just seemed like the moment,” Revels said.

The changes in curriculum not only added a Bachelor of Science degree, but changed the core classes in the department as well, according to Walsh.

“We had to streamline some of our existing curricula, just so that people could progress through without a hitch,” Walsh said. “When you take the core classes… there’s no hidden prerequisites.”

“We’ve really just kind of streamlined the curriculum so it’s better for the students and makes more sense,” Revels said.

This option will make Central the only college in the state of Washington that offers both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science in geography, according to the presentation the department made to the Faculty Senate.

Many universities in the Pacific Northwest offer only a Bachelor of Science.

“A good percentage of our students who graduate with a degree in geography from Central end up in what we loosely call the GI-science end of things,” Revels said. “In a more applied sense, physical geography.”

The degree will give students an edge in their chosen field outside of academia or in applying to graduate school, representatives of the geography told the Faculty Senate.

Walsh agreed, stressing that a scientific background is especially important in the professional field of geography.

“For a lot of people who come out with a geography degree, they’re going to work for the department of ecology or the forest service, or somewhere like that, where they really are doing science,” Walsh said. “To have that science attached to the geography degree makes them a lot more competitive.”

Walsh said the student feedback in the department so far has been enthusiastic.

“The students I’ve talked to would like to have a B.S.,” Walsh said. “They understand it’s a lot more marketable.”

Both Revels and Walsh said the department hopes that this will be a draw for students who otherwise might not have considered geography.