How STEM Undergraduates Choose, Navigate, and Integrate Interdisciplinarity in College and Beyond

ABSTRACT

Higher education has increasingly been called upon to develop interdisciplinary programs — particularly in STEM fields — that prepare students to address multi-faceted, real world problems. While the tensions between disciplinary cultures and interdisciplinary programs have been previously studied, relatively little is known about the experiences of students in interdisciplinary programs. In this grounded theory study, we interviewed 45 STEM students and alumnx from an interdisciplinary program at a public research institution to examine how individuals understand and integrate interdisciplinary perspectives into their academic pathways. Our findings demonstrate that participants moved through stages of interdisciplinarity regarding choice, navigation, and integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Interdisciplinarity
• STEM
• grounded theory

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge generous support from the Mahoney Family Sponsorship of the UMass Amherst iCons Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use alumnx instead of the historically gendered term alumni throughout this study (see, Garvey & Drezner, 2019).