Students who are planning to major in the geological and environmental sciences should preferably have a Windows 11 system (desktop or laptop).
Although Apple/Mac laptops can be used for some of your GES coursework, we recommend Windows 11 systems because industry standard GIS software and virtually all software that controls field data collection devices do not run on Apple/Mac machines, and all of our GES computer labs run Windows-based machines.
***Chromebooks/Googlebooks and iPads are not useful as they cannot run the software needed in GES coursework.***
The following software may be required as part of your GES coursework. These are all available to download through the university for free.
- MS Office 365 (Word/Excel/Powerpoint)
- Adobe Acrobat
- Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator/Photoshop, etc.)
- Google Earth Pro
- Zotero
- ARCGIS
- QGIS
- MODFLOW
- AQTESOLV
- PAST
- MATCH!
- Anaconda Python (Spyder IDE)
- R studio
You can run some (but not all) of these programs remotely through https://udesk.appstate.edu. We also have Windows desktop computers with this software available for all students in our GES labs. However, if you want to do work off-campus it would be useful to have a computer that has sufficient capacity to run these programs (particularly the Adobe suite).