Prospective Students

Marine Science is an incredibly diverse field of study that integrates a number of traditional disciplines. Students in marine science are therefore exposed to new ways of thinking and lends itself to a continually rewarding career. Below are a list of disciplines at Cal Poly and how one could match that with a marine topic.

• Biology – Study of marine organisms, populations, communities, ecosystem function.
• Chemistry – Cycling of inorganic salts, transformation of dissolved organic material.
• Computer Science – writing code to command/control autonomous underwater vehicles.
• Engineering – design/building of instrumentation resistant to pressure and salts.
• Mathematics – modeling the 3D current flows along the California coast.
• Physics – instrument design, applications of lasers to detect particle fields.
• Soil Science – coastal erosion, sediment transport in Morro Bay Estuary.
• Statistics – validation of model output, determining significance in population changes.