Undergraduate study: Geographical Tripos

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Introduction

The Department at Cambridge is a flourishing and expanding academic community committed to high standards of teaching and research across the whole field of Geography: our concerns and methods embrace the philosophies and techniques of the natural, social and historical sciences and also engage us with other disciplines grappling with the challenges of a changed and changing world. Geography has a long tradition at Cambridge. The first University Lecturer in Geography was appointed in 1888, the first Reader in 1898.

Teaching was initially for a special examination leading to a diploma in geography. The Geographical Tripos - the examination for a B.A. degree - was established in 1919. In 1931 the first Professor was appointed and in 1933 the Department moved into its own accommodation. That building, which now constitutes the eastern end of the Department, was considerably extended in the 1930s, with the construction of new lecture theatres and laboratories.

In the 1980s, the building was further extended with the addition of a top floor to provide a new laboratory for computing, remote sensing and geographical information systems. In 1999 the Department expanded again, to occupy two floors in an adjacent building where new laboratories, seminar rooms and offices are housed.

Since then, the Unit for Landscape Modelling has become a research unit within the Department (2000); the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has been integrated into the teaching and research activities of the Department (2001); and the Scott Polar Research Institute has become a sub-department (2002). The Department currently has 38 academic staff including eleven Professors and four Readers.

The Department of Geography today is a flourishing and expanding academic community committed to high standards of research. The questions we ask and the philosophies and methodologies we draw upon, embrace the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. Research is represented by our main research clusters of Regional Economy and Society, Society Environment and Development, Historical and Cultural Geography; Environmental Processes, and Glacial and Quaternary Change.

In 2008, staff in the Department produced about 150 publications, and attracted research funding from a wide variety of sources. There are currently around 60 PhD students and 35 students on Masters programmes. Geography has been researched and taught at Cambridge for more than a century; during that time both the world and geography have changed immensely.

Geography at Cambridge has a remarkable tradition and also a great future. Join us – and become part of that tradition and help make the future of geography at Cambridge.

Undergraduate Studies

Each year about 100 undergraduates are admitted to the University of Cambridge to read Geography. Geography at Cambridge involves undergraduates in a wide range of lectures, practical classes and field courses, organized around a three-year course (called the Geographical Tripos) which is divided into three parts, with an examination at the end of each year. In effect, the Tripos system is a compromise between the continuous assessment favoured by some universities and the emphasis placed on ‘Finals’ by others. Each examination is self-contained, with a separate result at the end of each year: there is no averaging out at the end. This means that it is possible to combine one subject with another, because you can change Triposes between one year and another. Whether you join us for one, two or three years, direct from school or having studied part of another Cambridge Tripos, this brochure, together with further information elsewhere on this website describes for you the kind of Geography we teach throughout our undergraduate course.

First year

From October 2011, all first year students take two core papers designed to provide a broad introduction to key themes and issues in human and physical geography.

Paper 1: Human Geography explores topics related to globalisation and the historical geography of the modern world; Fordism and welfare; urban geographies, social geographies, ecological, economic and political perspectives on resources; urban geographies, cultural geographies and sustainable development.

Paper 2: Physical Geography explores topics related to plate tectonics and volcanism, atmosphere and climate, oceans and climate, hydrological and geomorphological processes, glaciology, biodiversity and the quaternary.

Each of these papers is assessed at the end of the year by a written examination (one three–hour examination for each paper).

Students also take a Geographical Skills and Methods paper that provides a basic training in skills such as numerical methods; survey and interview techniques; documentary and archival data; spatial data; and field, laboratory and desk–based skills.

Please note that the structure of the course at Cambridge is being significantly revised for the year 2011-12 onwards. The structure and content above are correct at time of writing, but the titles of the individual papers and the details of their content will be revised further before October 2011. For further details, please contact the Department.

Second Year

In the second year you begin to specialize (if you want to), but we expect you to maintain an interest in the discipline as a whole.

This means that you choose four papers, but these must include at least one paper from each corresponding human and physical geography group. You also write an essay on Geographical Ideas, presented in the form of an open book examination, which builds on the foundations laid in the first year. In addition, you will start to prepare for your dissertation.

The papers currently on offer are:

Group A: Human Geography

• Cities
• Understanding the Economy: Contemporary Geographies of Capitalism
• Development
• Geography and Public Policy
• Culture and Society

Group B: Physical and Environmental Geography

• Processes in the Climate System
• Glacial Processes Landforms and Sediment
• Environmental Hazards
• Rivers and Coasts
• Biogeography

Geographical Ideas Assessed by open book examination

Explores the philosophies of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and a wide range of Geographical theories

Practical Classes

Assessed by practical exercises

• Field and laboratory methods in Physical Geography.
• Surveys, interviews and qualitative methods in Human Geography.
• Geographical analysis of historical sources.
• Quantitative techniques in Geography.

Fieldwork

All students are currently expected to participate in a week’s field class. Recent venues have included: Mallorca, Berlin, Dublin, the Algarve, Morocco and the Swiss Alps.

A piece of submitted work produced on the field class forms part of the assessment in the second year.

Please note that the structure above is correct for the academic year 2011-12. The structure of 1B teaching is under revision and will be different from October 2012. For further details, please contact the Department.

Third year

In the third year, from October 2011, students select four papers, from a choice of 12, which are assessed by either three–hour written examination or by a combination of two–hour written examination and a coursework project. Papers on offer vary each year depending on patterns of research leave but those available in 2010–11 include:

• Europe and Beyond: Politics, Societies and Economies
• Political Geography: Geographies of Post–Colonialism
• The Social Engagement with Nature
• The Human Geography of the Arctic Regions
• Contemporary India: The Politics of Society, Environment and Development
• Geographies of Discipline and Social Regulation in the Nineteenth Century
• Biosedimentary Coastal Systems
• Biogeography
• Glacial Environments
• Volcanology

Dissertations

As part of the third-year examination, students submit a dissertation (not exceeding 10,000 words) on a subject of their choice. Members of staff and research students are available for preliminary advice on appropriate topics and procedures, and there is some supervision during the third year. The basic research is undertaken during the summer vacation at the end of the second year: this is an opportunity to put into practice what has been taught in lectures and practical classes.

The subjects and locations of dissertations vary widely, as a few titles from recent years indicate:

• A Lost Community? Migration and community on St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly
• Saviour or Stealth Tax? Pay-by-use Domestic Waste Charging in Dublin, Ireland
• Food Access in Malawi: An Island Perspective
• International Volunteering: The Balance Between Commercialism and Development
• Living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death? Management and Risk Perception of Volcanic Hazards near Mt Rainier, WA
• Sex, Space and Social Controls: The Geographies of Fear in Contemporary Britain
• The Coffee Landscape of Honduras: Biodiversity and Fragmentation
• Sulphur Dioxide and Hydrogen Sulphide Emissions from Mutnovsky Volcano, Kamchatka, Russia
• Historical Geographies of Community Centres in Singapore: Entanglements of Power in the Constructions of a Postcolonial Nation
• Recent Temporal Changes and Spatial Trends in the Dynamics of a Shrinking Valley Glacier: Haut Glacier D’Arolla, Switzerland
• Observing surveillance: a Cultural Approach to Police Surveillance of New York.

Some students choose to do the research for their dissertations abroad, whilst others stay in the British Isles. Some funding is available from the University, via the Department and a number of travel awards for which there is open competition amongst undergraduates. In addition, some Colleges are able to make travel awards. However, the potential costs of fieldwork have to be carefully considered at the planning stage to ensure that the dissertation is feasible.

Some common questions... and answers

How much work is involved in studying Geography at Cambridge?

Terms at Cambridge are much shorter than at other universities, but are used intensively. Each academic year consists of three terms of eight teaching weeks. Teaching occupies the first two terms, together with the first two weeks of the third term: the remaining six weeks are given over to revision and examinations. You can expect to have 7 or 8 one-hour lectures each week, though this is only a rough guide: much depends on which papers you are taking and how they are timetabled. In the first two years you will also have laboratory, practical classes or workshops each week. In the summer vacation after your second year you will work on your dissertation. In all three years you will normally have three one-hour supervisions per fortnight. You will also have to keep up with the reading for each course, but unlike some universities you are not required to study a subsidiary subject.

Is the course arts-based or science-based?

All first degrees awarded by Cambridge are Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degrees - even to students studying Natural Science, Engineering or Medicine - so the name itself doesn’t mean very much. In practice, Geography is what you make it: the teaching programme is broad enough to include those whose primary interests are in humanities, social sciences or natural sciences; or all three.

Which school subjects are most useful?

It really doesn’t matter which subjects you studied at school. It isn’t even essential to have studied Geography (although most students will have done so). If you are particularly interested in Contemporary Human or Historical Geography, then Economics, English Literature, History and Sociology are useful supporting subjects; if you are interested in Physical Geography, then Biology, Geology, Mathematics and Physics are useful; and wherever your interests lie, a working knowledge of a foreign language will help you to keep in touch with developments in what is, after all, an international discipline.

Is fieldwork an important part of the course?

Yes. Field trips form part of some practical exercises in years one and two, with trips, for example, to the North Norfolk coast, to Wicken Fen, or to important Quaternary sites in East Anglia. In addition, there are currently one-week residential field courses held during the Easter and summer vacations, all outside mainland Britain. A compulsory general field course for second year students gives rise to a piece of assessed practical work. Some specialist field courses are also associated with second or third year lecture courses; locations have included Dublin, the French Alps, and the south-west of Switzerland. Students need to make a modest contribution towards the cost of residential fieldwork, which is heavily subsidized by the Department.

Outside the formal teaching programme, many undergraduates organize their own overseas expeditions, often under the auspices of the Cambridge University Expeditions Society, which authorizes around 25 expeditions every year.

What is CUGS?

CUGS (Cambridge University Geographical Society) is organized and run entirely by undergraduates. Its activities include lecture meetings at which members have the opportunity of meeting Geographers from outside Cambridge, plus social and sporting events.

College admissions and teaching

College Admissions

Since Cambridge is a Collegiate University, applications are handled by individual Colleges and not by Departments. You can either apply directly to a particular College (as do the vast majority of applicants) or make an ‘open’ application, in which case your application will be assigned to a College by the Intercollegiate Applications Office. There is plenty of information available about different Colleges on the internet. If possible, try to visit a couple of Colleges, by booking a place on one of their Open Days: dates are given in the Cambridge Admissions Prospectus. In general, all Colleges select candidates on the basis of school reports, interviews and results in public examinations. Almost all Cambridge Colleges that admit Undergraduates will accept applications for Geography, with the exception of Peterhouse and Pembroke. In some years certain Colleges have more Geography students than others, with the pattern fluctuating from year to year in part according to the quality of the applicants they receive. In recent years the following Colleges have made a strong commitment to Geography: Christ’s, Downing, Emmanuel, Fitzwilliam, Girton, Homerton, Jesus, King’s, Lucy Cavendish (mature women), Magdalene, Murray Edwards (women), Newnham (women), Queens’, Robinson, St Catharine’s, St Edmund’s (mature students), St John’s, Selwyn, Sidney Sussex, Trinity Hall. The table below indicates the numbers of Geography students and Fellows by college for 2008-9. Recent application statistics given both by subject and by College can be found at http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/statistics/ and http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/statistics/docs/geog.doc

College Teaching

Like all subjects at Cambridge, Geography involves a mix of University and College teaching. Each College has its own Director of Studies in Geography who looks after your academic progress, making sure that you keep on top of the course. College teaching is collaborative, not competitive: everyone finds different parts of the course difficult, and you can learn a great deal by listening to the ideas of others. For this reason College teaching revolves around supervisions, where a small group of students discuss a topic.

You are usually expected to have written an essay for each supervision. This is a valuable discipline, but it is intended to be a springboard for discussion: supervision essays do not count towards your final examinations. This means that you can afford to be more adventurous than might otherwise be the case: you can read beyond the syllabus, try out your own ideas, and reach your own conclusions. Supervisions are led by experts in the field, and since no College has a monopoly on these, you can expect to be supervised by people from many different Colleges while you are here. In this way, not only do you have the chance to tackle questions at the frontiers of research; you are also exposed to different teaching styles, ideas and opinions.

Table - numbers of Geography students and Fellows by college for 2008-9

College	Number of Geography undergraduates in all years of study	Number of fellows in Geography	Director of Studies from another college*
Christ's	11	2	x
Churchill	14	2
Clare	6	1
Clare Hall	0	0	n/a
Corpus Christi	6	0	x
Downing	17	3
Emmanuel	25	3
Fitzwilliam	25	4
Girton	26	3
Gonville and Caius	1	0	x
Homerton	12	1
Hughes Hall	1	0	x
Jesus	18	2
King’s	5	1	x
Lucy Cavendish	0	0	x
Magdalene	7	1
Murray Edwards	7	1
Newnham	16	3
Pembroke	2	0	x
Peterhouse	1	0	x
Queen's	5	0	x
Robinson	18	2
St Catharine’s	26	4
St Edmund's	5	0	x
St John’s	17	2
Selwyn	7	0	x
Sidney Sussex	19	2
Trinity	5	0	x
Trinity Hall	8	0	x
Wolfson	2	0	x

* Not taking account of patterns of leave

Careers for Geographers

No Cambridge degrees are vocational in the strict sense: even graduate engineers, lawyers and medical students have to undergo further training before they practise. But employers are very obviously attracted to graduates who have a good knowledge of the wider world and a genuine interest in economic, political, social and environmental issues; who are trained to deal with multivariate problems and to grasp their wider implications; who are used to writing essays and completing research projects on their own initiative; and who are skilled in information retrieval, data management and computing.

For these reasons, Cambridge Geographers find that a very wide range of career opportunities is open to them. It is difficult to obtain accurate data on the destinations of students, but information collected by the University Careers Service for 2006-7 gives some indication of career choices after graduation: 32% went on to further study, including PhD, taught or research Masters degrees, legal training (3%) or teacher training (3%). 12% went into ‘Social, Community and Charity’ work, including work in the Environment and Development Sectors, 7% went into Public Service (including the Civil Service, at home and overseas), 7% went into Management Consultancy. The rest went into Arts and Recreation, IT, Publishing and Media, Research, Teaching, Other Services Industries and Other forms of employment which could not be categorized. The University Careers Service assists students in finding suitable employment, and two of its careers advisers take a special interest in Geographers. The Department also now publishes a magazine Landmark for its alumni. Browsing through the pages of the magazine provides further indications of the range of directions that Geographers from Cambridge go after graduation. See: http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/alumni/

Student profiles

Departmental Facilities

The Library

The Library of the Department of Geography holds one of the largest specialist geography collections in UK, comprising over 40,000 books and approximately 10,000 bound copies of periodicals, of which 47 titles are current subscriptions. There are also over 150 series of Working Papers and research reports as well as a large collection of off-prints and other ephemera. Electronic access to thousands of academic journals and a growing number of key texts is available via the main University Library (UL).

The Geography Department Library is an integral part of the wider Cambridge University library network, consisting of the UL and its dependent libraries, including Department and Faculty Libraries and also College Libraries. Many other Cambridge libraries are useful to geographers, including: the Marshall Library of Economics, Seeley Historical Library and the Central Science Library, as well as those of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre of South Asian Studies. The catalogues of the Department and many other libraries can be searched using an online link to the Union Catalogue of College and Department Libraries. In addition, those Colleges which regularly admit significant numbers of geographers usually have extensive holdings of geographical books and journals.

Computing

Computing, Automated Cartography and Remote Sensing Computing resources play an important part in courses at undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. levels. The main teaching laboratory consists of 40 Pentium PCs with printer and projector. There are also two separate smaller teaching laboratories for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Research student use located in the Sir William Hardy Building. These facilities provide opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students alike to develop ‘hands on’ skills in geographical information technology. In addition the computing facilities provide the framework in which the Department carries out many of its research activities. To this end most staff members have PCs in their offices, which may be used for anything from computational modelling of ice flows to textual analysis or statistical processing of census data.

Geography Science Laboratories and Workshop

The Department is particularly well-equipped to support teaching and research in coastal, fluvial and glacial geomorphology, and diverse aspects of Quaternary studies, with a wealth of field survey equipment ranging from powered boats to ice drills and echo sounding equipment. Environmental modelling of all kinds is also supported by in-house design and fabrication of electronic instrumentation for use in the field. The Geography Science Laboratories are extensively equipped to allow hardware modelling of fluvial and coastal processes and sophisticated analysis of physical and chemical properties of soils and sediments. There is also a new Teaching Laboratory located in the adjacent Sir William Hardy Building.

Cartography

The Cartographic Unit produces original, high quality, maps and diagrams to support teaching and research. In-house Mac and PC computer platforms enable images to be imported, edited and exported in a variety of graphics and GIS software packages and file formats. Products range from campus plans, road maps, conference material, book and atlas figures, wall maps, and research reports. The service is available to the academic and research community within the department and, by arrangement, to staff from colleges and other university departments in Cambridge.

The Map Library

The Map Library houses a reference collection of world mapping, atlases, tide tables, gazetteers and cartographic texts. This includes a wide range of UK topographic cartography, from the Ordnance Survey First Edition quarter sheets of the 1830s to the latest open access Explorer 1:25,000 series, together with UK thematic maps at various scales. A range of commercial UK street plans, administrative maps, and European medium scale topographic maps are also stocked.

There is a comprehensive coverage of Cambridge and East Anglia. The atlas collection includes national and thematic atlases, with themes such as transportation, demography, economics, climatology, history, archaeology and war.

Digital Imaging and Reprographics Unit

The Reprographics Unit provides Graphic Design, Desktop Publishing, High Resolution Scanning, Colour and BW Printing Copying, Print finishing and Binding, together with a Digital Photography, Digital Image Enhancement and Image Repair and reproduction service. The service is available to the academic and research community within the department and, by arrangement, to staff and students from colleges and other university departments in Cambridge.

Further information

Further information about Geography at Cambridge is available on the internet, at http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk.

If you have any questions or require more information, please write to:

Undergraduate Admissions Enquiries
Department of Geography
Downing Place
Cambridge
CB2 3EN

E-mail: undergraduate.enquiries@geog.cam.ac.uk

The University of Cambridge Admissions Prospectus is available online.

Paper copies can be obtained from:

Cambridge Admissions Office,
Kellet Lodge,
Tennis Court Road,
Cambridge
CB2 1QJ

How to find us

Maps to the Department are available.