The Complete Guide to Becoming An Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary

Chapter 1: What Does a Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary Actually Do?

Let's start by clearing away the fog. When you see "Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary" on a career website, it sounds like one job. It is not. It is a category of jobs that share a few DNA strands: you have deep expertise in at least one geoscience, you are employed by a college or university, and you are expected to teach and usually also do research. But the actual week-to-week experience varies enormously depending on where you land. A professor at a regional state university in Oklahoma teaching meteorology to mostly undergraduates has a different job than a research scientist at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology affiliate teaching one seminar per year and running a $2 million lab.

Because you are weighing this career, you need the unvarnished daily reality, not the catalog version. So let's walk through what these teachers actually do, hour by hour and task by task.

Teaching: The Part Most People Imagine

At its core, you are a teacher. Your primary job is to help college students understand how the physical world works—the rock cycle, ocean currents, jet streams, planetary orbits, the chemistry of the atmosphere. In a typical semester, you'll teach one to four courses. The number depends on your institution. At a large research university, a teaching load of two courses per semester is normal. At a teaching-focused liberal arts college, you might teach three