In an ideal world, college would be a place where students would build portfolios around skills they need, learned from multiple hubs of distinct disciplines, each teaching unique skills like web development or how to develop a business plan.
But our world doesn’t usually allow students this kind of freedom to engage multiple disciplines and learn as many concrete skills. As 21st century emerging professionals, it’s time we push boundaries and fight for those areas of learning that require application of knowledge from more than a couple of majors.
UNC should work with faculty, staff and students to develop a stronger interdisciplinary program.
A program like this would only prepare students for the jobs of today and the future, and those jobs increasingly involve skills of multiple disciplines. Consider all the web developers and data scientists moving from jobs at places like Facebook and Google to media organizations.
UNC actually has an interdisciplinary major. It allows students to build their own curriculum with classes from at least three departments. Unfortunately, this option doesn’t seem optimally publicized, thus it is less effective at preparing students for the professional world than it could be.
Not only do today’s jobs require knowledge of many subject areas, but they are requiring a heftier spectrum of professional skills, along with increased specialization for more complicated tasks.
Stanford University’s Institute of Design has already begun brainstorming the future of interdisciplinary education, promoting the value of practical skills.
Looking at the Independent Activities Period the Massachusetts Institute of Technology maintains halfway through each academic year, we see a window of opportunity for exploration among and outside of majors. Students have a month to delve into ideas and interests, whether they have to do with their majors or not, and learn skills along the way they didn’t have access to before. They get to feed their interests without the confines of a standardized curriculum.
Students have more diverse and complicated interests and passions than many colleges and universities give us credit for. The U.S. Department of Education released in 2014 that more than 47,000 students graduated the year before with multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary majors. That’s a 74 percent increase from 10 years prior.
