Ben McIlwain
The academic world is experiencing increasing growth in multidisciplinary studies. Once disparate fields are coming together in previously unforeseen ways, producing such hybrid offspring as astrobiology, bioinformatics and computational linguistics. Current university students will go on to provide the bulk of the workforce in these nascent fields. So why does this university make it so hard for students to get recognized experience in multiple fields at once?
In the absence of devoted majors for multidisciplinary studies, a student’s best bet to combine two disciplines is to double up and take on two separate majors. It’s simply impractical to expect the university to add new majors for all of the emerging multidisciplinary studies, as there are so many of them (although I am looking forward to the eventual creation of the College of Computational Cryptoxenocartography).
The problem with double majors, though, is they are not realistically achievable for the average student within a four-year timeframe. I’ll admit, I’m not sure if I’d be able to tackle two full course loads and still maintain what little social life I have left. The solution is to allow students to get certification for dabbling in another field outside of their major without forcing them to work themselves to death. What I’m talking about, of course, are undergraduate minors, which are within the grasps of most students.
So why is it that so few colleges offer minors? You can’t get a minor (or “certificate of merit” as it’s sometimes called around these parts) in any of the subjects under the jurisdiction of the College of Chemical and Life Sciences, including chemistry or biology. Out of more than a dozen departments of the A. James Clark School of Engineering, International Engineering is the only minor program. Nor are there any minors offered from the School of Business. All of these subject areas can be synergistically combined with other distinct areas to form cutting-edge multidisciplinary fields, but they are mostly out of the grasp of the average student.
Luckily, there are a few colleges that do offer minor opportunities, such as the colleges of astronomy, philosophy and computer science. I would especially urge everyone to at least take a look at the computer science minor. In this day and age, how many college graduates can honestly say they don’t expect to be using a computer at all in their post-graduation job? How many can truthfully claim they know all they will ever need to know about computers and that it wouldn’t help to learn a bit more? Heck, I often feel as if there’s a lot more I could learn about computer science to help be more efficient, and that’s even my major!
Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), the university isn’t doing any worse than its peers on this issue. Institutions of higher learning are notorious for lumbering along and doing the same old things while the world changes around them.
With the advent of this new age of information that combines multiple fields in search of new knowledge, universities are going to have to adapt and allow their students to take on many fields at once. Even the traditional concept of the major itself, the idea that a person goes to college to learn about just one thing in isolation, will eventually disappear entirely. But in the mean time, the university should adapt and make it easier for students to combine fields of study by increasing the availability of minors in all colleges.
Ben McIlwain is a junior computer science major. He can be reached at cydeweys@gmail.com.
