The Department's facilities include the new F.P. Kallay Laboratory in Schnabel Hall, designed to facilitate research and teaching in the emerging areas of computerized geographic analysis, including GIS, remote sensing, and cartography. Outfitted with over two-dozen Pentium computers, the lab utilizes ESRI's widely used ArcView and PC ARC/INFO GIS software.

The Department also offers an especially rich variety of field courses, giving students first-hand experience in geography outside the classroom. Trips in the last few years have visited Yellowstone National Park via the Oregon Trail, major Indian mound sites of the American South, and the various National Park units of central and northern Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. These field courses normally run during Spring Break or summer.

The geography department also encourages student attendance at academic and professional conferences. Students attended the 2006 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago. The group of VU students who attended the 1992 meeting of the East Lakes Division of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) at Central Michigan University was the largest from any school. VU students also attended recent meetings at Indiana State University and the University of Nebraska. VU even hosted the 1996 joint meeting of the West Lakes and East Lakes Divisions of the AAG. This meeting brought nearly 200 geography faculty and students from across the Midwest to our campus, and VU geography majors played an integral role in smooth operation of the conference.

On the strength of their academic achievement, VU students have earned teaching assistantships and research grants in geography from such nationally recognized graduate schools as the University of Iowa, Pennsylvania State University, Michigan State University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Texas just to name a few. The geography faculty maintain ties with a number of these programs and actively assist students in the graduate school application process.

Students who maintain a high level of academic accomplishment in geography are eligible to join Gamma Theta Upsilon, the International Geography Honor Society. Potential employers and graduate programs alike recognize this achievement, and over a dozen students currently belong to the VU chapter of GTU, which dates to 1950.

Outside the classroom, geography students interact socially through various departmental outings. In the past, groups from the Department have visited Chicago's Chinatown district, the nearby Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, and Indianapolis' MSE Corporation, one of the largest GIS firms in the Midwest.