For graduate students to become leaders in sustainability, we must transcend disciplinary boundaries

Abstract

In the face of the climate crisis, is the academy preparing graduate students to engage in the interdisciplinary work needed to create a sustainable future? In 2021, the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) at the Georgia Institute of Technology convened a group of 7 doctoral students from 7 different disciplines: history, economics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, city planning, and architecture. The intent of this program was for students to work on self-directed interdisciplinary projects around sustainability. This article describes our experiences as doctoral students in the interdisciplinary BBISS program. As a result of our participation, we have come to see our research through new disciplinary lenses, which enables us to better understand the impacts of our work from a broader systems perspective. Here, we discuss the challenges of interdisciplinarity in academia and highlight the value we see in strengthening interdisciplinarity in graduate education and research. We believe graduate students can become more effective, collaborative problem-solvers, and be better prepared to lead future sustainability projects when given opportunities to integrate interdisciplinary work into their existing program demands. Graduate education should encourage future scholars to broaden their horizons beyond the boundaries of their disciplines, provide opportunities for students to enhance their capabilities as collaborators and team members, and enable students to meaningfully engage with others in traditionally dissimilar fields to better tackle the increasingly complex sustainability problems we face. Our own experiences in the open-ended, interdisciplinary, multisemester BBISS program are evidence of the value of such programs, and we offer some additional suggestions for how individual programs, schools, colleges, and universities might modify doctoral program requirements to better support interdisciplinary work in graduate education.