Why Interdisciplinary Study Matters For Each of Us
My friend Dan is an opera singer.
Homemade Seafood Pasta
A few years ago, while performing and studying in Italy, Dan would have vocal coaching sessions with a famous Maestro. Together they would explore Verisimo and work through repertoire like I Pagliacci or Il Trovotore. Then, at the end of every lesson, the Maestro would teach Dan to make pasta.
“You cannot sing if you cannot cook!” the Maestro admonished my friend, and together they would set to rolling out miles of linguini blackened with squid ink or fettucini into which they carefully layered fresh herbs.
For years I’ve thought about the Maestro’s words—they were so romantic, so idealistic—and yet they made perfect sense.
Through the practice of one art one more easily learns another.
One discipline informs the next.
How We Let Students Miss The Boat
We let go of the idea that one discipline informs another early on.
For those students who intend to apply to college, the words well-rounded echo through every meeting, every resume overhaul, every essay redraft. “Colleges are looking for students who are well rounded,” we drone. And so what do we advise?
Join the soccer team. Make sure you’re in the debate club. Can you write? Great. Join the literary magazine. Travel to Ghana this summer. How many hours are you volunteering at the local hospital? Double it. Learn to play the saxophone. Take AP Calculus. Take AP French. Take AP Art.
Where did this checklist come from? Doesn’t this seem a little bit… insane?
That’s because it is— it’s us trying to take the easy way out. It’s hard to teach students to do the tough work of synthesizing their talents, ideas, and experiences into lives, to turn students into people who have something to offer. Instead we burden them with an overloaded checklist that we think mimic the resumes of the best and brightest, rarely affording them the time to delve into something with passion and meaning.
These padded resumes we tout are as empty as if the Maestro had barked at Dan: “Match this pitch!” “Crack this egg!”
They miss the point entirely.
Adults Aren’t “Cooking,” Either
I think we all secretly know how vacuous those hefty resumes can be; after all, most of our adult lives don’t reflect that kind of multiplicity and we find ourselves seemingly no worse for wear. However, it’s possible that we don’t sense the loss of enrichment specifically because we weren’t being enriched in the first place.
The average American adult’s life right now can usually be categorized in one of two columns: Work and Entertainment.
Entrepreneurs, especially, are addicted to what has been coined The Hustle—every activity, every night, is another event related to work. Somewhere along the line we got the idea that working more would invariably yield better results. People brag about being up at 2:30 going through work email.
The cultural phenomenon of workaholism makes it easy to lose all our productive energy to work. It follows, then, that when we’re not working, we’re on Facebook, socializing, and passively consuming (individually, around 2.8 hours of television a day) 1.
Realizing The Need to Cook
Not too long ago, Dan’s friends confided in him that they sometimes take the day off from work and, instead, pursue what they jokingly call “Dan Days.” 2 As it turns out, Dan Days involve squeezing as many obscure and unusual activities into a day as they possibly can (e.g. perhaps some kayaking, eating outlandish sashimi or home-brewing beer, and memorizing a little Falstaff) because they’re under the impression that this is how Dan lives his life.
And to his credit, I have to tell you, he pretty much does.
Dan knows that without breadth of experience, you cannot focus. That’s what makes him so insanely good at his work, his art.
The Challenge: Find Your Own Cooking
What if it were true that you cannot build a business unless you can build a birdhouse? What if I told you that you can’t sell cars if you can’t explain algebra? You can’t write grants if you can’t grow tomatoes? You can’t manage communities if you can’t change your oil? What if you can’t make art if you can’t teach your dog to sit?
…or can’t teach if you can’t listen.
….or can’t rethink culture if you can’t be alone.
Does your work suffer because all you do is work? Do you always play and forget to produce?
What’s your cooking?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I love to cook. Not bake; cook. I love the creative flow of imagining a taste, and flavoring my imagination while shopping for ingredients. The first time ever cooked with lemongrass I thought I had discovered an entirely new color I’d never seen before. The pumpkin soup tasted like a concerto.
What you speak beautifully in this post is what the french brilliantly refer to as “Metier.” Metier, unlike ‘career’ here in the U.S., means craft. When I worked at L’Oreal, we were encouraged to live in our metier, which along with beauty and cosmetics included fashion, art, pop culture, architecture, science, design, trends, advertising, music, film, etc. The height of a newly built tower might inspire a new lengthening mascara, or ways to describe it. A fall runway may inspire a new shade of lipgloss. A jazz concert may inspire a new smoothing cream.
I’m now one of those “Hustling” entrepreneurs (auntrepreneurs) and I often go to Barnes and Noble to be inspired by book design, words, ideas, and the people inspired by them. I’ll check out the business section for literal inspiration and the cooking section for sensorial inspiration.
Nothing gets my creative juices flowing like discovering a new recipe for roasted fish. And yes, I’ll add some lemongrass so I can sign along.
Shelly Kramer told me I’d love this post and she was right! It’s so easy in our culture of specialization to get caught in this trap – trying to fit all of the layers of life into the weekend while forcing ourselves into the straitjacket of some narrowly focused notion of “the breadwinner,” “the manager,” the corporate employee,” the good wife and mother,” all the rest of the week. And doing this – we lose what makes us special, what makes us real, approachable, interesting and whole. By doing this we lose our lives. We don’t enjoy the weekends, which are too tightly packed to really experience any of the things we cram into them and we move through our work and family life like robots moving through swinging doors – punching time clocks, meeting deadlines and quotas and watching the finish line move farther and farther away.
What would happen if, instead, everyone learned to ‘cook’? What if we brought our musical instruments to the office and started a band? What if we rode our bicycles to school or to work? What if we grew our own vegetables in compost that we made from our own kitchen scraps and, instead of watching TV, we invited friends in – on a Tuesday evening (imagine!) to enjoy the feast?
You’ve inspired me.
A lot of people ask me why I don’t attend more career related events after work. I think your post sums up exactly why. I spend much of my time working at work, that I need the excess time to dive into other areas so they can inspire me to be the best I can be. I can think of a complex analogy involving a sphere, light source, and mirror to further support this, but it’s too late and I am far to lazy to type it out.
I am not sure though that I have a “cooking” in my life. I just generally love to learn. Sometimes it’s normal things like Greek mythology or architecture (which came in handy interpreting Inception-FYI). Sometimes is bizarre things studying death cults or building home made hover crafts. I find the more I push outside of my standard circle of cognitive processing, the more I am able to change my perspective on something. And with each change or perspective, I am able to view a project from different angles. Challenges are overcome because I am able to shine the additional mental light to solve them.
Great post.
Why do I always feel an irresistible urge to chime on your posts? Must be because you’ve always got something interesting to say!
Maybe I’m missing something, but I feel a little that you’re arguing two different things here. On one hand, you’re against the shotgun, well rounded approach because students aren’t devoting enough time to one thing they’re passionate about. On the other hand, you’re saying that we all need to be less single minded in our passions, because having wider interests you enjoy can make your creations (work, art, etc.) better. So which is it?
As always, I’m thinking about teens and college. I’m a volunteer alumni interviewer for my alma mater, which often gives me an opportunity to get some insight into the admissions process. My college has jumped on the recent trend of “angular admissions.” My husband recently wrote a blog post on it here: https://www.word-nerd.com/pt/blog/default.aspx?id=9&t=What-are-angular-college-admissions In a nutshell, the former emphasis on well-rounded students has been usurped by a focus on “angular” students who pursue only one primary interest. I suspect this approach is a backlash to the “overscheduled child” epidemic. Kids are forced into karate, foreign languages, multiple sports teams, dance and/or music from birth, in the hopes of improving their admissions profile. When every applicant looks exactly the same as all the others, I can’t blame admissions officers for seeking something distinguishing!
Even though I understand it, I can’t say I’m a fan of angular admissions. I think it will shift talented kids into sinking all of their time and energy into one activity (and likely one chosen by their parents instead of themselves). The goal is to become truly proficient in one area, but you’re necessarily sacrificing interest in other things by doing so. The end result is a student that may be a virtuoso violinist, but one who has not devoted any time to other valuable pursuits like athletics, volunteerism, reading, etc. I know I would not have wanted to have such a one-dimensional girl as my college roommate! If you can’t converse intelligently on anything beyond the violin, how can you be expected to make use of the many opportunities college offers? You can argue that intense practice and focus are the only way to master a skill, but you leave yourself without much of a life if you spend every moment in the same activity. I fear that the student body at my alma mater is actually going to be much less diverse than before, lacking a capacity to see the world from a variety of perspectives. Or worse, the students will finally be free from their childhood “passion,” but find themselves without anything to take its place.
Perhaps the middle ground is choosing multiple activities that you’re truly interested in, rather than indiscriminately joining every club available in the pursuit of a “well rounded” application. An emphasis on quantity (both too few and too many) should give way to an emphasis on quality and variety (fewer activities, but ones you truly enjoy). This approach can serve kids well into adulthood, when time is limited by demands of work and family. Parents take note!
Thanks Elizabeth for a terrific post.
@jenn Dude, I’m not arguing two different things at all. Part of what I’m saying is we give kids stupid checklists (checklists that sound a lot like what real multifaceted, interesting, super talented kids actually engage in) instead of teaching extremely gifted kids how to synthesize a life that actually *is* that multifaceted and interdisciplinary and letting average/above average kids really sink themselves into one/two/three things that are really meaningful.
My point is that the list is just a list…. I personally do what feels like 20 different things (growing things, cooking, painting, sculpting, yoga, kettlebells, singing, reading philosophy, you-name-it….) in addition to my “work,” but that, admittedly, is not totally normal. However, you could match my “resume” up with some kid who’s been loaded down with “the checklist” and, while our “lists” may look the same, our personal experiences of those other practices could be completely different (and I may be doing myself a favor by saying I’m pretty in touch with what I’m doing and why I’m doing it). It’s not about the list. We talk about it like it’s the list.
And this post isn’t about admissions– this post is about *adults*, our culture, how we spend our time, and finding real meaning. The only reason I brought up the kids in the first place is because we start ‘em out with this mentality early. Only one section of the four talks about students at all— it’s just the culture most teenagers experience and the message we as adults send them. [...and I'm trying to get *away* from college admissions talk because it makes me want to poke my eyes out occasionally....]
HOWEVER, thank you for giving me such an exhaustive response. You’re always always always welcome here.
(I’m an idiot for not having nested this.)
I know you’re always thinking about the big picture! Just had admissions on my mind, is all
And I wanted a little clarification from you, which I got! I think we’re really in agreement, just arguing from different corners. Just poking holes since that’s my specialty 
I’ve previously written about the need for writers to read broadly because of all the additional influences, ideas and knowledge that comes from moving outside of a niche, so your post makes perfect sense to me. And resume building activities often don’t cut it because you don’t get a chance to see the connections between activity A and activity B.
Sometimes we can find educational benefits through unforeseen connections. For example, exposure to music theory can help reinforce mathematic theory by understanding the relationships between notes and ratios.
This is particularly timely since Newsweek published The Creativity Crisis earlier this month and I think there’s room for building more thoughtful connections between learning activities.
Thanks for this! I’m looking forward to sharing this post with colleagues and students. I teach in a new interdisciplinary program and from where I’m standing, you’ve hit a few nails on the head. A multi-faceted resume is a symptom of interdisciplinarity, not its cause. The power tool in all of this is the ability to make fluent, fluid connections between different experiences and expertise. If you can do that then you can leverage your unique variety of interests to build solutions others can’t see. Imagine the benefits if you can also do that to collaborate with colleagues!
Great post. I think having a strong focus is key. If you spend 80% of your week working on art, then you can spend 20% of your time outside of that discipline taking on new hobbies or learning. With many students unsure of what they want, if you don’t know what you want to do with 80% of your time then its harder to reap the benefits of multiple activities. Everything becomes a distraction. Deciding on the foundation of your focus- art, business, writing, etc.- will allow you to apply new learning to that lens.
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