Fourth-year College student Preyasha Tuladhar is on a pre-med track, but not in the typical sense.
"The human side was missing," she said.
Tuladhar wanted to combine science with history to get a sociocultural perspective, encompassing both the physiological side of medicine as well as how people are affected by it.
"I wanted to make the most out of my education, [but] I didn't find what I was looking for in science or the humanities," she said. "The two disciplines don't ever talk to each other ... You have to realize there are different perspectives. If you don't acknowledge [that], you can't create solutions."
Tuladhar found her way of approaching her interests through Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries, a program she developed through the Interdisciplinary Major Program.
According to Dean William Wilson, the Interdisciplinary Major Program was initially called University Studies. Students would build a major from all of the schools, taking a variety of different law, medical and business classes, to name few. By the early to mid-1980s, however, the Interdisciplinary Major Program was established, with Wilson as the program chair.
Not everyone is qualified to pursue an interdisciplinary major -- as a distinguished majors program, a 3.4 GPA is a prerequisite for admission.
"We're pretty sticky about the 3.4 GPA," Wilson said, adding that the prerequisite was one of the few DMPs hold across the board. The program is designed for students who display "unusual interests, superior ability and exceptional self-discipline" and offers them the opportunity to design their own course of study instead of being confined a particular department.
"Most everybody who comes in here has a good idea," Wilson said. "The limits come down on arts and sciences," he continued, emphasizing the importance of creativity while still keeping the program within the boundaries of those particular areas of study. Although there is no limit on the number of people admitted to the program, usually three to four students are selected each term.
This is partially because of the multitude of majors created to satisfy a demand for inter-department studies. Such majors include Political and Social Thought, Studies in Women and Gender, Political Philosophy, Policy and Law, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and South East Asian, Latin American, African American and African Studies. Echols Scholars, too, have the opportunity to create their own major.
"We're not in the bad-news business," Wilson said. "If [their program] is not going to work, we'll try to fix it."
Often students will apply not knowing that some of these established majors exist, so Wilson tries to "steer students to the right place." Similarly, if a project topic is too narrow or too large, advisors will try to adjust the plan or help the student choose a different major.
When proposing a program, students must submit not only an application, but also a list of courses, usually at the 300-level or above, that they plan to take. Thirty hours of coursework from three different departments are required for the major, the number of hours most other majors require.
Third-year College student Micaela Connery, who designed a program called Public Service and Policy, chooses
her classes from the history, economics and politics departments. Her three advisors help her pick courses from each department geared towards non-profit work, volunteerism and public
service.
"Your courses are never going to seem like they fit perfectly, but they
do end up coming together," she said. "I kind of view it as a toolbox of knowledge. In other majors like math you have to take one class and then the next ... Instead of building upwards with your classes, you build inward with broad classes that get more specific to the central core idea."
At first, Connery said it seemed like her classes were very different, but Connery is beginning to see them work together.
"I'm taking Social Policy and Economic Welfare now, and I can really see the overlap," she said. "Not all [classes] fit perfectly, but they all apply somehow."
In addition to completing 30 credits, students must write a thesis paper at the end of their fourth year. According to the Interdisciplinary Major Program's Web site, the thesis is meant to be a "full exploration" of a student's project, investigating the subject as thoroughly as possible. But as the Web site notes, a thesis also teaches students the difficulty of comprehensively tackling a problem when vast quanti-
ties of information are available and time and energy are limited.
Tuladhar, who will be graduating this spring, is in the process of writing her thesis about how HIV/AIDS is "a mirror of society's inadequacies."
She said she finds HIV fascinating because of its lack of "a magic bullet," she said. "Most diseases have this cure for this thing, but HIV has no bullet -- you need the sociocultural factors as well. It builds on racial [and] socioeconomic disparities."
She said she finds HIV fascinating because of its lack of a single cure: The physical virus must be considered in addition to racial and socioeconomic disparities.
The theses, which are generally 50 to 60 pages for humanities-based projects, are usually due in the beginning of April. Because of the independence of each individual major, however, the student and his or her advisors adapt accordingly to each unique project.
The interdisciplinary major requires a measure of determination, as demonstrated by the vast possibilities of the program itself.
"I had a hard time in the beginning because my advisors are all separated, and I was worried I wouldn't get to know them at all," Connery said. "But I check in with them every once in a while, let them know how I'm doing. I'm pretty self-motivated but I like that -- I like making my own plan."
Some students have been worried about how their choice of an interdisciplinary major might their plans after college, but Wilson has assured them not to worry. On the student's transcript it reads Interdisciplinary Major, but "there is no reason to turn [a student] down," he explained. "You just need to get a letter from an advisor to say what it is, and take that added extra step. It always works"
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