<p>Is it? </p>
<p>Their courses: [B.S</a>. in Environmental Science, UCLA Institute of the Environment](<a href=“http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/academics/article.asp?parentID=417#major]B.S”>http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/academics/article.asp?parentID=417#major)</p>
<p>It seems like basic environmental science concepts and introductory courses are pretty simple and not too difficult, but when you get into the details of environmental science, it’s not that easy. Environmental science pulls topics from all science related fields and then applies it to environmental aspects; it’s generally easy, but once you delve into deeper topics (geology, hydrology, etc.), it’s not.</p>
<p>Environmental science is one of those fields that is so complicated and interdisciplinary (and thus hard) that only God knows everything that’s going on, so people end up simplifying it so much that the coursework at the undergrad level isn’t too hard.</p>
<p>The courses listed in the program you linked to sound like they will involve lots of cartoon diagrams of biological/chemical/geological processes/cycles. If you’ve taken advanced biology in high school, they will be sort of like that–lots of conceptual descriptions of processes, maybe some mathematics for some simple cases, and (if taught badly) possibly a bit of memorization. Depending on your instructors, the most advanced mathematics you may use will be some simple differential equations (taught to you in your environmental science classes) to model populations, chemical processes, and global warming. </p>
<p>Depending on your concentration, odds are you will have some field work that may be very challenging because of real-world problems (it’s a lot easier to talk about making a digital map than to make a map). Field work can be a lot of fun because you get to go outside and feel important. It can also be miserable if it’s cold, windy, and raining.</p>
<p>From my experience, faculty in environmental science tend to be very friendly toward undergrads. They are just happy that students are interested in their field. Your classmates are likely to be quasi-hippies, so they’ll be fun to be around.</p>
<p>As with any program, you can make environmental science very hard by going deep into one subarea of study. Interested in global warming? (Everyone is.) If you start studying it in detail, you’ll see that each little piece of global warming is very complicated and you could devote an entire lifetime of study to it and still not really understand what’s going on. For example, if you look into global warming and clouds, you’ll see that nobody really knows whether clouds help or hurt us with global warming. People studying clouds come from chemistry, physics, applied math, and atmospheric science backgrounds, and people study things like dust pollutants (lots of time in the laboratory, experimentally and theoretically challenging), wind patterns (related to weather forecasting, which is very hard and involves a lot of scientific computing and math), and quantum mechanical simulations of droplet formation (also very hard). Not only are the scientific techniques pretty hard, but putting them together to understand what’s happening requires you to know a good amount about a few different disciplines.</p>
<p>What is the job outlook, and/or what type of companies would one would for with a degree in Env. Science? I’ve been interested in that myself.</p>
<p>As i understand it, an environmental science degree is very similar to a Geology degree.
I have quite a bit of info in my thread below, with a couple of links on job outlook/companies and further education. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/science-majors/832362-b-s-geology-future.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/science-majors/832362-b-s-geology-future.html</a></p>