Hello, welcome. I'd like to introduce myself.
My name is Gavin Gillmore and I'm the Head of Geography Geology and the Environment, which is within the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing.
I would like to welcome you to this school and to say that we have been teaching geography and geology for over fifty years.
We are a strong believer in fieldwork and indeed, most of our courses are led by field based learning.
Fieldwork in the first year are in South West England and South Wales.
In the second year we usually go abroad to Malta, Teneriffe, Cyprus and in the final year we lead field trips to places like South Africa or Australia.
So, we strongly believe, as I said, in field based learning. We also strongly believe in research led teaching.
We did very well in the last research assessment exercise. All of our staff are research active and use that research to inform their teaching.
So within the school we develop key themes. We look at things like sustainability, climate change. The human geosphere interaction and the way that
humans impact on the geosphere, and the way that geosphere impacts on humans. In particular, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.
How we manage world situations and disasters. How we manage things like migration of population in response to disasters and response to economic change.
So, you can see that we strongly believe in developing themes throughout our programme.
Those themes link our modules together to form coherent courses, that I hope you will particularly enjoy studying.
So, it is very important to understand that we strongly believe in research led teaching and fieldwork led teaching.
We believe that the best geographers and the best geologists are those that have experienced theses things first hand.
Well I hope this has been useful for you and if you 
 would like to know more please feel free to contact us.
I would strongly recommend you coming to one of our open days. It's a great opportunity to meet staff, to meet students and to see Kingston which is a great place to live and study.
So please contact us and you can get information from the admissions tutor and we would be delighted to hear from you.
Thank you very much.
