For the Love of the SeaNew liberal-arts-based marine science degree lets undergrads dive into their passions.

In 2020, Brett Comsa was spending 10 hours a day making molds of teeth at a Portland dental lab when he finally accepted what he already knew: His career plan needed work.

The 25-year-old Idaho native had flunked out of college once “because I didn’t have any idea why I was doing it.” A job opportunity for his partner had landed the couple in Portland, where Comsa staved off the boredom of the tooth room by listening to science podcasts. He especially liked the ones about marine science, and he started to think about going back to school.

He didn’t want to be a hard-core ocean scientist, but was drawn to the idea of a career related to the sea. Comsa reached out to Oregon State and promptly found himself on the phone with professor and oceanographer Jack Barth.

Barth was founding director of Oregon State’s Marine Science Initiative — now Marine and Coastal Opportunities — launched in 2016 to coordinate and multiply the impacts of OSU’s world-class programs in ocean science, fish and wildlife, and coastal engineering.

From its beginning, the initiative included a proposal for an interdisciplinary, arts and social sciences-based undergraduate marine studies degree housed in the College of Liberal Arts. Called MAST, for “MArine STudies,” it was intended to create ocean-literate professionals with the social and communications skills to interpret and translate complex ocean issues.

“When you have a degree called ‘studies,’ we’re always talking about interdisciplinarity,” commented Nicole von Germeten, the program’s lead administrator and a professor of history for two decades.

Thought to be unique among leading ocean research universities, MAST is offered at the Corvallis campus and via Ecampus. It offers broad choices of science and liberal arts classes, and students are guided into specialties likely to lead to careers or graduate school. The program is decidedly anchored in the College of Liberal Arts, with nearly all of the college’s programs contributing to the curriculum. 

While the full major is designed for undergraduates with a humanities interest — about 100 will be enrolled this fall — the new MAST minor may also appeal to science students looking for a way to expand their understanding of what it means to interact with the ocean. 

Curious students started reaching out even before the program’s finishing touches were in place. Comsa picked up prerequisites at Portland Community College so he could enroll as one of the first MAST majors. From the start, he said, the teachers and advisors encouraged him to build skills he’d need to make himself useful.

“I learned that I wanted to specialize in aquaculture, and I didn’t even know what that was when I started this,” he said. He also discovered a passion for the ethics of food production. He then won a fellowship interning with experts at the University of Maine’s Wabanaki Center as they genotyped mussels and studied challenges facing Indigenous shellfish harvesters. It was a profoundly long way from the tooth room.

Unlike Comsa, new MAST graduate Emma Coke, ’24, doesn’t remember when she didn’t have a passion for the coast. Her family had a beach place in Seaside, and her high school teachers cultivated her interest in science and current events. 

Coke loved journalism and especially enjoyed translating complex topics into forms accessible to others. The MAST program, which offers courses like Writing for Marine Studies and Literature of the Sea, helped turn her passions into an aspiration.

“I didn’t know environmental journalism was a thing,” she said. Coke graduated in June as the MAST program’s first College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Senior, recognized for “combining science and liberal arts disciplines with an ethical, outreach focus.” She secured a newspaper internship for the summer and plans to build a career as a science writer focused on marine issues.

Lauren Rice, ’23, now working on a master’s in marine resource management at Oregon State, has the distinction of being the first student to officially sign up as a MAST major. “I spent countless hours waist-deep in the ocean or exploring tidepools,” she said, “which is kind of a lot when you think about how cold the ocean is on the Northwest Coast.”

During Rice’s sophomore year, her MAST advisor asked her to pick a specialty within the major. She chose environmental and social justice, because she wanted to help people understand how a changing climate impacts communities that rely on marine resources.

“Part of how the degree was marketed to us was that we are being trained to be boundary spanners,” she said. “I was trained to be ocean-literate but still have an understanding of social processes and things like that.”

MAST students are encouraged to gather as much field experience as possible. Rice worked on the Haystack Rock Awareness Project at Cannon Beach as a tidepool interpreter and a website developer.

“I was out in and around the tidepools, translating the ecological knowledge that I gained from my degree for all kinds of people, some who knew tons about the ocean and some who were seeing the ocean for the first time,” she said.

We are being trained to be boundary spanners. I was trained to be ocean-literate but still have an understanding of social processes.

---

As the MAST program evolves, it becomes more evident that it is especially attractive to students who, partly because of their own passions and partly because of the confidence and solid education they earn in MAST, are often interested in what’s over the horizon.

Jeremy Schaffer was raised mostly in the central Willamette Valley of Oregon, but his family lived in Newport for a while when he was in high school. At 14, he overcame his shyness to volunteer at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, helping people understand what they were seeing.

“Today, that’s really the focus of my major — education, outreach, that sort of thing,” he said. He worked as a kayaking tour guide in Newport’s Yaquina Bay but will take to the water in a much larger vessel this fall: he’ll spend a year on the crew of the three-masted schooner Denis Sullivan, sailing up and down the East Coast and into the Caribbean.

The trip will delay his graduation, he said, and he’s somewhat surprised that he mustered the courage to apply. “But then, when I told Jack [Barth], he was practically jumping out of his seat,” he said.