Students who are planning to major in the geological and environmental sciences should have either a Windows 10 or 11 system (desktop or laptop) or a Mac/Apple system (laptop or desktop).
***We strongly discourage the use of Chromebooks and iPads, which do not support the software needed in GES coursework as they cannot download software without considerable modification which will void their warranties.***
The following software may be required as part of your GES coursework. These are all available through the Bookstore and/or Tech Support for free.
- MS Word
- MS Excel
- MS Powerpoint
- Adobe Acrobat
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- Google Earth Pro
- Matlab
- Endnote
- ARCGIS
- QGIS
- MODFLOW
- AQTESOLV
- PAST
- MATCH!
- 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. 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 and Matlab).