The Fisheries and Wildlife Management program places a strong emphasis on understanding relationships among organisms, their habitats, and human resource users by blending a conceptual understanding of fish and wildlife ecology and population dynamics with practical skills obtained during laboratory and field exercises.
Students graduating from this comprehensive, applied curriculum enjoy careers with state, federal, or tribal natural resource management agencies as technicians or biologists. Students are also well prepared to pursue graduate school and careers in research.
If you’re passionate about becoming a Conservation Officer, Fisheries Manager, or Wildlife Manager, our focused concentrations at Lake Superior State University are designed for you. What sets LSSU apart? Our small classes, faculty-led labs, and the fact that our “labs” are right in our backyard. You’ll get hands-on experience sampling fish and wildlife in diverse field sites just steps away from campus.
When you complete the required courses for the Fisheries Management or Wildlife Management concentrations, you will have satisfied all educational requirements for certification by either the American Fisheries Society or The Wildlife Society.
LSSU has a great reputation for placing Fisheries and Wildlife students in graduate and professional schools, such as:
Graduates of SNR complete a capstone senior thesis or service-learning project which they design, implement, analyze, and present their findings on a topic of their choosing.
Lake Superior State University student team sets a fyke net to collect fish at Ashmun Bay in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. Federally-funded through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Monitoring project monitors birds, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and water quality to develop ecological indicators of wetland health.
Former manager of LSSU’s CFRE Fish Hatchery holds up a container full of Atlantic salmon fry that were hatched in the wild, not in the lab’s hatchery. Evidence of Atlantic salmon reproducing in the wild was discovered by a student who was doing research on lake sturgeon in the St. Marys River.
Our facilities and resources are top notch and our laboratory is right outside our door–forests, lakes, rivers, and wetlands.
Our Fisheries and Wildlife Management program is well-known throughout the region for educating students in the field, lab, classroom, and community. We provide our students with the knowledge and technical skills necessary in natural resources, but we also show them how to apply their knowledge to real-world management situations.
Prior to my time at Lake State, my professors rarely learned students’ names and my classes often felt impersonal. I didn’t realize how important that faculty interaction could be until I spent a few weeks here. The personal attention is motivating, often pushing me to work harder than I would have otherwise.
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