Scuba Career college degrees? What would be best?

[muddiver]

There are job available for for Civil Engineers with training and experience in Environmental Engineering and Ocean Engineering that do some diving as part of their job that do their work using SCUBA equipment. There are also some jobs for Civil Engineers with Commercial Diving certifications.

A degree in Biology, Marine Biology or Kenesiology can get you into teaching at a university or doing research that involves SCUBA diving.

 

[BioLogic]

Limnology is the branch of science dealing with freshwater ecosystems. If you take that up and do diving, it's likely to be muck diving (low visibility). Some of my colleagues (I teach biology at a university) do some diving as part of their research, collecting specimens and such.

The diving isn't the major part of the job, though -- the figuring out what you found is.

 

[NoVaScuba]

I'm also a biologist and I recommend that you only pursue a career in Marine Biology or Ecology if you have a true passion for the field and not just diving. Funding for these fields is low and jobs are hard to find. You will have to complete at least a MS and possibly PhD. Salaries are low enough that you'll never make up the income you'll lose in school. I considered Marine Biology as an undergrad and changed because the job prospects were so poor. I don't think the situation has improved much since then.

If you're just looking for job that involves diving, follow up on one of the engineering choices mentioned here. It'll pay a lot better and you'll probably have a much better job selection.

 

[Kevrumbo]

Take a look at Certified Hyperbaric Technologist; you can work anywhere from a large medical center, to a resort destination with a recompression chamber on stand-by for diving accidents.

 

[Crowley]

The only real 'career' in scuba diving is working as a dive master or instructor or similar - for which you most definitely don't need a college degree and unless you plan to own your own dive centre any degree you do have will be almost immaterial in many locations in terms of getting a job. Degrees that might help include business studies of some description, but if you want to work in the industry full time then you need languages - a degree in German would get you a job where I work by the end of today!

Other fields such as marine biology, underwater archeology, search and recovery (police, army, coastguard) etc. are fields in which you will do some scuba diving, but as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. As BioLogic suggested above - you'll do a few dives and spend the rest of your day sifting through whatever it is you are researching at the time.
Possibly you will be sitting in 5 metres of zero vis and sewage looking for rotting corpses. Depending on the field, you may find this rather takes the fun out of the diving itself.

Underwater photography and videography can be good earners so some form of study along those lines might be worth considering. There are niche market careers available in tec diving but you will pay a great deal to get there and it's not for everybody.

Commercial diving and scuba diving have very little in common apart from the fact they occur underwater and involve breathing compressed gas. The commercial market can be very lucrative, but also can be hard and dangerous work. Usually the trade (cutting, welding etc.) comes before the diving - ie better to be a welder trained as a diver than a diver trained as a welder.

Hope that gives you some ideas!

Crowley

 

[Supershark]

Beat me to it Crowley