Geography, BSc (Hons)

Geography plays a crucial role in understanding landscapes, satellite data interpretation, and environmental monitoring, making it highly relevant today. At Swansea University, both BSc and BA Geography programmes develop practical, numerical, and computational skills for careers in regional planning, environmental management, and more. Students benefit from exceptional fieldwork in nearby areas like the Gower Peninsula and international destinations such as Austria or Borneo. The curriculum covers key topics including climate change, glacial processes, and plate tectonics, taught in advanced facilities by renowned academics like Professor Tavi Murray.In the first year, students explore global environmental change and sustainability through compulsory and optional modules. Year two delves into data analysis, human and physical geography, and overseas field trips, while the final year includes a dissertation and advanced topics like meteorology and world cities. Assessment combines lectures, seminars, practicals, fieldwork, exams, coursework, and tutorials, with flexibility to switch between BSc and BA schemes until the end of year two.

In Year 1 you'll study several compulsory modules covering topics such as global environmental change, people place and nation, global shifts and sustainability. You will then choose from optional modules covering geographical skills and methods, writing skills and personal development planning and practical field projects, and topics such as mobilities and migration, urban geography and geology. In Year 2, you'll choose from a range of optional modules covering data analysis, approaches to human and physical geography, and conducting social and environmental research. You'll study topics such as geographic information systems, glacial environments and processes, creative geographies, quaternary environmental change, regional economic development and policy, boundaries and connections, global vegetation patterns and dynamics, political geographies, urban modelling and geological record of past environments. You'll also have an opportunity to take part in an overseas field trip. In Year 3, you'll undertake your dissertation and choose from a range of optional modules covering topics such as migration, security and humanism, contemporary rural Britain, geographies of national identity, glaciology, humid tropical environments and landscapes, meteorology and atmospheric science, plate tectonics and global geophysics, World cities, environmental modelling and the climate of the last 1,000 years. You may also have the opportunity to undertake an interdisciplinary field trip to the Indian Himalayas (Sikkim).