The School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma instituted a State Regents-approved Masters of Science in Professional Meteorology (MSPM) degree program in 1997. The program is designed to prepare students for private sector employment or for any organization whose primary mission is related to customer service or product development. The MSPM is a non-thesis degree program requiring 36 course hours, 15 in Meteorology, 12 in a secondary area of study and 9 in additional electives. There are extensive additional communication and writing requirements; additional information on degree requirements can be found at http://weather.ou.edu/grad.php. Students are also required to do an applied research project, normally chosen and supervised by the sponsor. Students are supported by a company for 2 years, and since the sponsorship is provided as a donation to OU, there are no overhead or fringe benefit costs. In addition, OU pays tuition costs; thus sponsorship of a student is much less expensive than funding an equivalent research project by a grant to the university.

While initial acceptance was slow, the program had its first graduate in 2002, and 10 more since then. Sponsors have included companies involved in energy, commercial weather services, instrumentation, and state and federal agencies. The sponsors can recommend the secondary areas of study, which have included finance, computer science, hydrology, GIS, statistics, entrepreneurship and economics. The MSPM students are selected through a normal rigorous graduate admissions process plus a review of additional essays and an interview. We have a 100% graduation rate of our MSPM students, and they have obtained good jobs in the energy and weather industries as well as in academia. The School of Meteorology looks forward to working with new sponsors who wish to benefit from guiding top students in an academic program tailored to their business.