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The Graduate School at the University of Missouri–Columbia (Mizzou)

Doctorate in Forestry

Official Graduate Catalog Entry: To the Index

Admission

See About Forestry for details.

Career Preparation

The PhD degree in forestry is designed to prepare students for academic careers in research and teaching or other advanced scientific or professional careers. Only in the rarest cases are students admitted to the PhD program without a master's degree.

Doctoral Committee

The student pursuing the doctoral program is expected to pass a qualifying, comprehensive and final examination administered by the student’s doctoral committee. This committee is structured as defined by the MU Graduate School and must have representatives from at least 2 disciplines outside forestry.

Qualifying Examination

The qualifying examination determines whether the student’s background is adequate to enter the PhD program. It also is intended to ascertain if there are areas of weakness in which a candidate will be required to gain background through appropriate course work or areas that prohibit entry into the program.

Comprehensive Examination

The objectives of the comprehensive examination are twofold:

  1. to determine if a student has acquired sufficient depth and breadth of knowledge in selected areas of concentration
  2. to evaluate the candidate’s capacity to apply that knowledge in solving applied or theoretical problems.

Final Examination

The final examination is directed primarily toward exploration of the dissertation research project.

Foreign Language Requirements

Requirements for foreign language and a collateral field, if any, are determined by the student’s doctoral program committee. The doctoral committee is expected to make an assessment of the student’s needs as they relate to the student’s background and educational objectives.

Dissertation

An independent scholarly dissertation approved by the student’s adviser and program committee must be completed in a form acceptable to the doctoral committee.

Graduation

The PhD degree is conferred only upon those students who, after extensive study, have demonstrated a high level of achievement in their particular specialization in forestry and have completed independent research contributing to knowledge in the field.