This track within the Geography Major is designed to meet the interests of students who wish to pursue geography related careers in areas other than urban and regional planning or cartography and remote sensing. Students by advisement can use a portion of this track to fashion their own geography program leading toward concentrations in such areas as: international studies, locational studies or marketing, economic development, environmental assessment, resource management, and cultural studies. This track provides students with the intellectual platform from which they can select more specific paths to follow at the graduate level, and the technical skills and professional training that might allow them to obtain entry level positions with a bachelor's degree.

Foremost among educational needs today is the ability to cope with life on a rapidly shrinking planet, where population is exploding, resources dwindling, and where pressures on the most elementary creature comforts (food and living space) are mounting dangerously. Most of the problems facing the current generation of young people have strong geographic overtones. Where, physically, will we put another 100 million people in the United States by the year 2010? Where will we build the 100 new cities – each averaging one million inhabitants – to accommodate them? Where will we find the resources to feed, clothe, and house these new Americans let alone the other 7 billion citizens on the world in 2010? Where will we put the land fills to handle the waste generated by these people? These are the kinds of questions for which people are going to need answers. These are precisely the types of questions which modern geographers are addressing, at scales ranging from the neighborhood to the nation.

Geographers carefully observe and measure the human use of the earth under diverse combinations of natural and cultural environments. Such observations and measurements yield geographical knowledge that will help us to understand our changing world and its parts and will improve the performance of business, management, law, education, planning, public affairs, and other professions. Thus, to the many and various agencies, firms, institutions, and governments that employ geographers, geography means and encompasses a set of skills and a specific point of view that will help them operate efficiently and effectively. Check the career opportunities section of this Web site to find out in more detail about professional careers in geography and see a representative sample companies and agencies where alumni from the Oneonta geography program are working.