Munk hated banking. In 1937, he left the firm to attend the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. While at Caltech, he took a summer job in 1939 at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps) in La Jolla, California. Munk earned a B.S. in applied physics in 1939 and an M.S. in geophysics (under Beno Gutenberg) in 1940 at Caltech. The master's degree work was based on oceanographic data collected in the Gulf of California by the Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup, then director of Scripps.