Interdisciplinarity

Experiences:

Along with my Mechanical Engineering major, I have a Psychology minor that helps to round out my education, and allows me to truly understand the people that I will be impacting through my engineering work. This minor counts as a Gold interdisciplinary experience.

Gold:

Psychology Minor at UMBC

• 18-19 credit program
• 800+ hour time commitment

When solving the Grand Challenges, although the engineering side is incredibly important, there is much more to consider. For my challenge, one must not only consider the engineering solution, but also consider the people who are being helped. Understanding the culture is key when making changes to benefit the community, and a field such as Psychology is crucial for doing so. By combining my Psychology minor and my engineering disciplines, I can provide an interdisciplinary perspective to my project as well as to any team I am working on to complete my challenge of providing access to clean water for everyone. Through my minor, I learned more about intersectional approaches to a variety of issues and how cultures can vary tremendously in comparison the US for a variety of issues. I learned about health issues, physical and mental, both in the US and in other nations, and how they must be approached and handled in different manners. Commonly, when approaching any issue, we tend to use the US as the standard or treat the US as the "norm," but this is something we need to avoid; just because something solves a problem in the US, it may not be a transferable solution to other countries. My psychology courses helped to reinforce this and made me think more critically about how we define and solve problems, and the stereotypes, and assumptions we use. I was also taught over and over how all of the issues we talked about required intersectional approaches, and this is something that can be applied in my engineering career as well; I must be able to take an intersectional approach, and look beyond our own cultural ignorance that we consider to be the "right way."

Learning Objectives:

Program Learning Objectives:

Perspectivism

• Humanities perspective is very different from the one gained as an engineering major
• Allows a different thought process and viewpoint than most engineers

Being a Team Member

• Using strategies and concepts learned in Psychology I can help avoid or mediate team conflict
• Can better understand team member's strengths and weaknesses as well as how to balance them out among the team

Interdisciplinarity Learning Objectives:

Identify the different disciplines that contribute to the solution of a complex problem

• Psychology deals with understanding people beyond what you see at the surface. Mechanical engineering is focused on creating solutions in order to improve human welfare, which inherent is impacting the lives of individual people. Psychology also focuses a lot on improving the welfare for people through therapies, learning, mediation, etc. The common ground to improve the lives of people is what brings these two very different disciplines together in order to tackle one common goal.

Describe and apply strategies for creating common ground between different disciplinary perspectives

• In order for different disciplines to work together well, the people from each discipline must be able to share some sort of common ground. I think one of the easiest common grounds that opposite disciplines may be able to find is the desire to help others, make the world a better place, improve the quality of life, or all of the above.
• Once the realization is made that everyone has the same end goal, it is easier to apply bridging strategies that will allow different disciplines and perspectives to work together

Describe and apply bridging strategies that facilitate the conscious integration of different disciplines

• The bridging strategy that I think would help the most in developing an integrated solution is the strategy known as “Bridging the explanation Gap.” This strategy recognizes that although certain disciplines may “provide explanatory leverage,” or in other words take the lead on parts of the project, that there are other disciplines that can offer “pragmatic or action-oriented leverage,” (Miller). In my case, I think this strategy works very well, because while the engineers and scientists will be the ones doing a lot of the work on the solution itself, the other disciplines are critical in the implementation and success of these solutions. My challenge is not just for engineering to solve, but will require the work of many different disciplines if we want to solve these challenges for good.

Matthew Miller and Veronica Boix Mansilla, “Thinking Across Perspectives and Disciplines,” Harvard Graduate School of Education Interdisciplinary Studies Project Technical Report, March 2004.