The intellectual resilience and flexibility of interdisciplinarians

Interdisciplinarian Traits

Interdisciplinarians

In their quest to become knowledgeable about several distinct subjects, interdisciplinarians must become conversant in the vocabulary specific to each discipline studied. Without this knowledge, they would be unable to converse effectively with colleagues or read the relevant literature across disciplines. When I first started college I was undecided about what major to pursue and started taking courses in different departments. I took developmental psychology, chemistry, guitar, and women's studies, which helped me to become conversant, and thus competent to converse in different disciplines. Once I selected a major, I continued to sample from different sub-disciplines before focusing on one or two. By taking a multidisciplinary approach, I was able to gain enough inside information to narrow my focus. In other words, I became an entry level interdisciplinarian in order to help me decide on a major.

If I were to seek an advisor for selecting one major among many, I would prefer to work with someone who has experience and knowledge in several disciplines. An interdisciplinarian advisor could help me to compare and contrast majors, because he or she would have insights unavailable to non-interdisciplinarian advisors. As a result, I would tend to rely more heavily on the information gleamed from an interdisciplinarian advisor because the cross-discipline comparisons would be more reliable.

Resilience can be defined as resistance to changing conditions without loss of efficacy. For example, a bicyclist may be trying to maintain a specific level of effort, but if the grade of the road being ridden changes sufficiently, then he or she may have to change gears. While the gears provide some flexibility in meeting changing conditions, intense training would give the bicyclist an internal robustness that would enable them to be resilient in the face of challenging conditions. In other words, a well-trained bicyclist can climb steeper hills than an unfit bicyclist because they have the advantage of both gears and training. The fit bicyclist is therefore more resilient. An interdisciplinarian may likewise be resilient to the evolution of disciplines over time. If a discipline expands into subspecialties, it is probably safe to assume that interdisciplinarians already have the intellectual tools and mindset necessary for adapting to such changes. If a discipline begins to fade from use, or is swallowed by another, the interdisciplinarian is again ideally suited to adapt. Interdisciplinarians are therefore more resilient to changes in disciplines that occur naturally over time.