With the rising tides of disruptive technological change, students interested in pursuing a career and exploring a subject like marine biology or marine science need to do it in a program that will offer them all of the cutting-edge tools they need to make the most of their time spent in an academic institution.

Since one of the core functions of marine science is to explore how the natural ecosystem plays out, students also need to attend a university with quick and easy access to waterfront environments. Students must practice how natural environments shift and change at the laboratory level­ to avoid going out into the real world without any sense of how in-field practices should be conducted.

A combination of these two extremely important factors is carried out day in and day out at Eckerd College, an undergraduate program on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Through an interdisciplinary combination of core marine science studies in addition to electives like climate change, marine botany, and sea turtle research, students get a more holistic view of what is critical to the environment and how they can apply their university studies to real-world environmental events and patterns.

This and much more are possible thanks to Eckerd’s research facilities, like an aquarium, geochemistry, sedimentology, radioisotope dating, microscopy, and molecular labs that provide students with exactly what they need to conduct research in coastal and marine environments.

Additionally, the school has research vessels, including the Weatherbird II, that can carry 13 students for up to two weeks at sea and accommodate larger parties for day-long excursions. The Hogarth research vessel also exists and serves as a 78-foot floating laboratory that can accommodate a science party of 10 for two weeks and has wet and dry labs on board.

But it’s better to take someone with experience of being on the campus. David Hastings arrived at the campus in 2000 and spearheaded research into paleoclimatology, climate change, and the impact of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico on ocean sediments and microplastics within the marine environment. Without the help of Eckerd’s location and its commitment to providing the most up-to-date research facilities and technologies, Hastings would not have been able to make the discoveries that have been instrumental to his career as a leader in the field of marine science.

While David Hastings has since retired, his legacy at the school lives on through the paleoclimatology, climate change, and geology programs whose curriculums he has pushed through his steadfast and decades-long worth of research in these specific areas. For the next generation of students to pick up the mantle of understanding the effects of climate change to inform policymakers, they must study in a location that gives them ample access to the environment as well as the tools needed to properly study those topics that are having a major effect on the environment, especially the marine environment.