Many of us choose our degree because we enjoy a particular subject. When making our UCAS choices, we are usually guided by the topics that interest us. But the real value of non-vocational degrees, what we write about in job applications and talk about in interviews, lies elsewhere. 

Enjoyment does not impress off the page of a covering letter. When we reflect on the value of our degree, we think about how it has shaped the way we think, and the unique skills we have developed that set us apart from other candidates. This was true for me: I chose English and American Literature because English was my favourite A-level, and as a consequence, in interviews, I emphasised my communication and critical reasoning abilities.

For anyone whose degree includes two or more disciplines, this difference presents a particular challenge. I saw this repeatedly during the eight years I served as admissions tutor for an interdisciplinary degree programme, Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (LANS). Although popular and successful, the programme had one recruitment problem: students rarely, if ever, chose it because of interdisciplinarity. Most had heard the term, and thought it had something to do with big issues like AI or climate change; they did not know it integrated knowledge from different disciplines to create new knowledge.

Instead, what attracted students to the programme was something much simpler: the freedom to study modules from across much of the University. For some, this is because they enjoy studying two or three disciplines; for others, they are still figuring out what interests them. This makes sense: asking a 17-year-old what they want to be studying at 21 is a bit like asking a 13-year-old to choose their A-levels.

Universities are increasingly promoting interdisciplinary education (see, for example, our University’s 2030 Strategic Framework). The reason is that many of the problems shaping our world are complex: immigration, for example, is not only a political and economic issue, but also a cultural, linguistic, religious, and social one. Because real-world problems span many domains, understanding them in their complexity requires insights from multiple disciplines. Universities should want to offer an education that prepares students to address messy problems that do not fit neatly into the scope of a discipline.

However, anyone whose degree includes more than one discipline has, by default, a multidisciplinary degree. This includes, for example, joint-honours degrees, and disciplines like Music, Gender Studies, and Criminology. In multidisciplinary work, the disciplines remain separate: politics asks political questions, biology asks biological ones, and so on. Without integration, interdisciplinarity does not happen. A common analogy is to liken multidisciplinarity to a bowl of fruit, and interdisciplinarity to a smoothie.

Simply placing subjects side-by-side does not teach us how to connect their knowledge. Being in a degree programme in which you study more than one discipline does not ‘magic’ you into an interdisciplinarian, and without integrative thinking, we lose sight of complexity and simplify questions. Instead, the questions we ask stay within the boundaries of individual disciplines.

Integrative thinking is demanding. It involves weighing what disciplines contribute to our understanding, recognising their limits, and relating knowledge creatively in order to say something new. This requires deliberate practice and a different type of education. For that reason, I think that when universities describe programmes as interdisciplinary, students should expect more than to study multiple disciplines. They should learn what integration is and have opportunities to practise it during their degree.

This matters beyond lecture halls, seminar rooms, and labs. It is easy to feel pessimistic about the future today. Social media, news, and politicians often reduce complex issues to simple soundbites. But real problems rarely have simple solutions. Multidisciplinarity is a valuable education, and it allows us to view topics through different disciplinary lenses; but without bringing those insights together, we cannot address complexity.

Interdisciplinarity is not trying to replace disciplines; we still need them more than ever. We also need thinkers who are skilled in synthesising knowledge across disciplines. Breakthroughs do not only happen by generating new data; they also happen when we view existing knowledge in new ways. If your degree exposes you to multiple disciplines, I believe its real worth lies in how you combine those ways of thinking.

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