<p>I did it.</p>
<p>Bachelor’s degree in microbiology, master’s in food science.</p>
<p>When I realized that I was interested in food science, I took some undergraduate courses in food science and related subjects as electives during my senior year of college. I also had to take some make-up courses as a graduate student, and I chose a master’s thesis topic that made good use of my microbiology background and didn’t require me to have a knowledge of things that were totally new to me, such as food engineering. That way, I could work on the thesis and course work simultaneously, and the gaps in my background didn’t matter. </p>
<p>In a field like food science, which is not offered as an undergraduate major at many colleges, graduate programs expect to have to accommodate students with non-food science undergraduate majors (although chemistry is more common than biology). Most of those students won’t even have the opportunity I had to take a few food science courses as an undergraduate. I suspect that the same sort of thing may be true in environmental fields as well.</p>