Geography is the study of distributions, patterns and movements across space, both physical and social. Human geographers study the geographic patterns of various human activities: economic, political and cultural. Physical geographers focus on the geography of physical processes and their effects: the geography of weather and climate.

At Ohio State, students choose from four specializations:

• The environment and society (E&S) specialization focuses on understanding the reciprocal relationships between social and environmental processes. Social processes such as land-use decisions, racial inequality and poverty, and political decision making are closely linked to biogeophysical phenomena.
• Urban, regional and global studies (URGS) examines a range of social, economic, political and cultural forces that are both immediate and distant: the globalization of production and finance, technological change, migration, transnational social movement politics, social conflict and war, and other forms of political conflict around race, gender and class.
• Students in the climate and physical geography (CPG) specialization study the interactions between the Earth’s surface, at local and global scales, and the atmosphere. For example, events in the Pacific Ocean such as El Niño or La Niña affect the global circulation and can change the location of the jet stream or the number of hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean.
• Students in the spatial analysis (SA) specialization develop GIS and spatial analysis skill sets that are crucial for today’s society and have many uses ranging from emergency management, business location and retail analysis, transportation modeling, crime and disease mapping, and natural resource management.