After recently having my application for the interdisciplinary studies program at Plymouth State University be accepted, I can’t help but think about the relief I would’ve had five years ago if I had known that something like this existed. As a sophomore in high school, I remember being bombarded with questions about what I wanted to study in college. As my high school career continued and I was allowed more freedom in picking my classes, I only became more confused. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted to study- it was that I wanted to study everything. I was engrossed in my anatomy and physiology class, fascinated by my Latin class, floored by all the things I was learning in AP Psychology. It became a joke among my friends that I was going to be a forever student because I wanted to major in everything. I had no idea how I was going to keep up with my passion for human biology, psychology, linguistics, and as of the winter of my junior year, my newfound love for forensic science. When it came to apply to colleges and pick a major, I decided to be a biology major because I thought that was what I had to do. During my freshman and sophomore years of college, I constantly felt slightly unsatisfied, like there was a piece missing from my life. When I sat down with the head of career development and he explained what the IDS program was, I had an a-ha moment. This was what made sense to me. This was how I could be unequivocally myself, how I could reflect what was important to me in what I was studying.
As I’ve mentioned, I started out my college career as a biology major. As an upperclassman in high school, I took as many science classes as I could- forensics, environmental science, anatomy, chemistry- if it was science based, I was in it. When I changed my major to criminology and psychology, I was shocked on the first day of classes when I discovered how different these disciplines were from science. The way that you have to think in a criminology class is entirely different from a science class- there was less memorization, less focus on hard facts, and far more critical thinking. This was an entire new way of approaching a subject that I had yet to learn, which caused me to think about how useful it was that I was involved in both disciplines. In the real world, knowing how to approach a problem from many different angles is incredibly beneficial and important for efficiency and comprehensibility. Moti Nissani’s article “Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity” does a great job explaining how beneficial interdisciplinarity is in solving real world problems. One example that the author used was how biologists and mathematicians worked together- “at the turn of the century some biologists believed that dominant genes would increase in frequency in relation to recessive genes. In this case, the interdisciplinary corrective was put into effect by the mathematician Hardy.” (Nissani, 1997). In reading this article, it is blatantly obvious that we cannot solve important problems without an interdisciplinary approach. After learning about interdisciplinary theory through PSU’s Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies course I’ve realized how much of an edge this program has given me. I’ve learned how to think like a scientist, I know how to approach problems like a psychologist would, I can tackle issues like a criminologist. I know so many people studying science that cannot think creatively if their life depended on it, as well as many liberal art students who don’t know how to analyze facts and data, and this is not something that should be ignored. A great quote from Bela H Benathy that Vartan Gregorian included in his article “Colleges Should Reconstruct the Unity of Knowledge” says “a technical problem of transportation, such as the building of a freeway, becomes a land-use problem, linked with economic, environmental, conservation, ethical, and political issues. Can we really draw a boundary? When we ask to improve a situation, particularly if it is a public one, we find ourselves facing not a problem, but a cluster of problems … and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods.” (Banathy 2015). As Benathy says so well, there are so many situations that are better approached with interdisciplinarity. Giving students a one track minded type education is truly detrimental to them, and is not helpful in furthering our ability to solve problems and create innovation. Learning how to approach not only school but life with an interdisciplinary approach has been a gift to my college career and I hope that more schools will develop IDS programs.
Articles used in today's post:
- https://press.rebus.community/idsconnect/chapter/colleges-should-reconstruct-the-unity-of-knowledge/
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