What sort of background prepares one to be an oceanographer?
Despite all the visibility of ocean science in print and video media, it is still off the beaten track of undergraduate education. Back in 5th grade, you will find a lot of would-be oceanographers, but whales, dolphins, waves and storms are often forgotten by high-school. The fact that there is no easy and obvious way into the field has determined that oceanographers are unusual (tenacious, determined, imaginative) people. Some of our greatest oceanographers never saw the inside of a university. Fritz Fuglister was an unemployed artist in the Great Depression, and happened on a job painting a mural in the police station at Falmouth, Massachusetts. Even murals come to an end, and he afterward secured a job plotting graphical data at the young Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The dot-plots began to tell him something, though it wasn’t his job to examine them; he went to sea, at first on the auxiliary sailing ketch Atlantis, and eventually became one of the select few blue-wat
