We encourage students of all backgrounds to learn more about how the land, water, and air around us directly affect our lives, whether by taking one course, or several, or a concentration program with independent research. Our department is known on campus for being open, friendly, and uniquely down-to-Earth. With approximately 30 faculty, 60 undergraduate concentrators, and 60 graduate students, classes are comfortably small, and faculty, graduates, and undergraduates interact frequently. The success of the undergraduate program is evidenced by the demand for Brown graduates in top-notch graduate programs across the nation.
DEEPS is one of the most active in developing and providing First Year Seminars, which emphasize interdisciplinary pursuits that reach beyond the physical and biological sciences into the humanities and social sciences. These freshman seminars offer such varied course topics as Global Environmental Change; Patterns in Nature, in Society; Volcanoes: Windows Into the Deep Earth; and Monsters of the Abyss: Oceanography & Sea Tales.