 Scripps director Harold U. Sverdrup (left) and protege Walkter Munk on the occasion of Munk's graduation in 1946. |
In the beginning, in a little green laboratory in the village of La Jolla, a handful of zoology students helped sort and classify marine organisms collected from the richly diverse Pacific Ocean only a few feet away. They were the first students at what was then the Marine Biological Association of San Diego.
Today, a century later, some of the most sophisticated scientific laboratories in the world dot the La Jolla coastline, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Here students continue with biological studies, but they also pursue other highly intensive academic and research endeavors in a curriculum that has set the standard for ocean and earth sciences.
The Early Years
The education of young scientists has always been an integral part of Scripps's history. University of California Professor William E. Ritter, the institution's founding director, worked tirelessly to secure funding, negotiate land deals, and "erect on this foundation a school or even a college of biological research."
 The early institution trained a number of women zoologists, including Myrtle Johnson, seated in La Jolla's Little Green Laboratory, circa 1907. |
To study with Ritter at Scripps, potential students had to be enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, then seek Ritter's permission to work with him in La Jolla during the summer months as a supplement to their classes at Berkeley. Ritter would assign each student a particular marine specimen to study. The student was required to collect the animal or plant from the ocean or bay, examine it under a microscope, and later draw it to demonstrate his or her understanding of its anatomy. Classroom discourse as a teaching method was rare, although students often attended the presentations that Ritter and others made to local residents.
In 1907, Edna Watson became the first student to obtain a doctoral degree in zoology based on work at the remote marine laboratory. The first student to be awarded a doctoral degree in oceanography at Scripps was Ancel B. Keys in 1930, during the tenure of the second director, Thomas Wayland Vaughan.
Vaughan added oceanographic studies to the biology curriculum and established a graduate program to help students master the complexities of the interdisciplinary field of oceanography. He also formalized the admission process and developed prerequisites for the courses. There were three students at the institution at this time.
