Great advice below in the other posts....first I am not aware of any BS degrees specifically in herpetology in the states (used to be, but I am not aware of any current programs) as most students at an accredited college/university are required to take a stack of general education courses (english, psych, history, etc.) and then your major courses, which could be as part of a biology or zoology major for example. But, you could find an institution that has a good herpetologist that would be willing to take you on for some undergraduate research (and also take a herpetology class as well). Not trying to recruit, but for example, I am an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college called Malone College in Canton, Ohio. Besides the biology major, we also have a BS Zoo Science major that will be up and running next fall (2004) in collaboration with the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. I also have a collection of approximately 225 reptiles (mainly pythons and crocodilians) that are used for behavioral and population genetics research....all conducted by undergraduates that work with me on these projects. I have one student researching the use of chemosensory modalities during underwater foraging in crocodilians, another doing molecular genetics (mtDNA) to resolve the systematic relationships of several python species, another doing caudal luring in response to varying levels of satiation in the dumerils boa, and yet another doing SEM/TEM (electron microscopy) on the structure of gustatory papillae in the tongue of crocs, just to name a very few. This is just an example of how to get involved (also many graduate students would love to have a dedicated undergrad to help with field/lab data collection). My advice is to find somebody that might be doing some research of interest, and see if you could tag onto some of the research. In our case since we only have an undergraduate degree in biology/zoo science, we place our emphasis on these students to give the sufficient background on how to conduct experimental/field research (and even get some publication/speaking experience as well). As Bryan mentioned the opportunities are endless, but the degrees are the stepping stone(s) to those opportunities. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions at all.

Cheers,
Chris

Christopher K. Carmichael, Ph.D.
Department of Natural Sciences
Malone College
515 25th Street, N.W.
Canton, Ohio
Tel: 330-471-8175
Email: ccarmichael@malone.edu

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