Education of Soil Chemistry

Thesis and research practice

When studying at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), you will conduct a thesis project towards the end of your BSc and MSc program (after following the required courses), for which you will work for several months on a topic of your choice. The Soil Chemistry Group offers thesis projects that fall within the research themes of our group (Soil Fertility, Environmental Geochemistry and Soil Carbon). As a student, you will work together with a PhD candidate and/or staff member on one of their projects or even pioneer with a completely new research idea! You will use state-of-the-art techniques to address your research questions and practice with data analysis and writing a scientific report. 

Besides writing your BSc or MSc thesis in our group it is possible to conduct a MSc research practice with us. This is a research project supervised by a staff member of our group that replaces the internship in your programme. 

Any questions about our theses or research practices?

If you don’t yet have a specific topic in mind, you are interested in conducting a MSc research practice or if it concerns a more general question about conducting your thesis research in our group, you can contact both thesis coordinators of our group:

View our available thesis projects

Internship

Doing an internship towards the end of your studies (after following the required courses) is part of the MSc study programme. The aim of an internship is to put your acquired knowledge and skills into practice, and at the same time gain relevant working experience at an academic level.

WUR distinguishes between two categories of internships: 1) a research internship, where you work on a research project that is completed with a research report, and 2) a professional internship, where you contribute to one or more projects and that is completed with a set of deliverables and a context report.

An internship is carried out outside WUR, at the company or research institute of your daily supervisor. You are welcome to suggest yourself an institution to conduct your internship, but we can also help you to find one through our large network of host institutes (for example NMI (Nutrient Management Institute), WEnR (Wageningen Environmental Research), TNO (Institute for Applied Natural Sciences) and many others). If you are interested in doing an internship with the Soil Chemistry Group, you can contact both our internship coordinators (Rob Comans and Hannah Vos).  

Interested in doing an internship with the Soil Chemistry Group? Please contact:

What do our students say?

Our courses

The courses vary from introductory courses into fundamental soil processes, to advanced MSc courses that dive into the details of soil chemical analytical techniques, applications of soil chemistry in practice or the role of biogeochemical cycles in climate change mitigation. In our courses we combine teaching theoretical background knowledge with a strong practical component. This means putting obtained knowledge into practice by studying soil chemical processes in the laboratory, greenhouse or in the field.

Furthermore, data analysis and geochemical modelling are important aspects in our courses, as well as training of academic skills. We constantly adapt and further improve our courses to the demands of society and the changing needs of our students.