What I learned in IS 2222

I started out my junior year of college with an understanding that I would just finish my college career in the major I had been pursuing because I had already completed so much of it.  It seemed like it wasn’t really worth trying to figure out a new one.  Then one day, a friend said to me, “Hey Brandon, have you heard of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program?”  No, I hadn’t.  And had I heard of it sooner, I probably would’ve switched into it sooner.  But that day I did some research.  The next day I emailed Robin DeRosa, and within a week I was on my way to a new degree.  All I had going for me was over 100 credits in a program I wasn’t satisfied with an about a year and a half to figure out my life.

I walked into class on the first Monday of this semester thinking that the class was going to be a “Hey let’s build your new major and get you the hell out of here” deal.  Little did I know that I would be learning about the history or Interdisciplinary Studies and would be forced against my will into enjoying Twitter and writing things for a website.  I started out thinking that Interdisciplinary Studies was a way for me to take the different things I enjoy and combine them.

I was right, but only like 3/4 right.  It turns out that Interdisplinarity allows anyone to view things in a broader mindset to really fully understand what is happening around them.  Most people look at the world from one perspective, that perspective they learned when they were at college focusing on one discipline with one epistemology.  Interdisciplinarity says that you can take that epistemology and combine it with another and another and potentially any amount of others.

This mindset is exactly what allowed me to convince the school to allow me to combine music and business to create a really broad Music Management contract that will introduce me to the world of large scale Event Planning in the music field.  Besides real world experience, there isn’t really a place for someone to learn about event planning in degree form.  But I looked at the courses offered at Plymouth State University and thought “I can take these business courses that are defined as generic marketing courses and I can apply the knowledge of music I have to them and suddenly they will be useful as a music business course instead of straight business.”  That’s taking the interdisciplinary approach.  Take off one hat and put on another, apply some knowledge to places you wouldn’t expect.  Innovation at it’s greatest.

I honestly believe that some people aren’t meant to be interdisciplinary.  There are people that fall right in with the generic disciplines and there is nothing wrong with that.  But then there are people that need a broader option.  They don’t function in one box, they have their hands in several different pools of thought.  These people need the opportunity to grow in that, they need a chance to learn in different ways at the same time.  That is why interdisciplinarity is important to the university.  Not everyone will utilize it but it needs to be there for those that will.  I want you to think about the most important things in your life and try to tell me that none of it is interdisciplinary.  Tell me that modern robotics advancements haven’t affected the medical field.  Tell me that the iPhone isn’t the most popular example of several fields crossing over.  Entertainment and communication combined with top-of-the-line technological advancements?  That’s interdisciplinary.  If the entire world thrives off of it, shouldn’t our education embrace it?

I plan to take that approach in life.  Everything you could ever imagine is probably possible right now.  It’s just a matter of finding the right combination of things that already exist in the world to create new, better things.  Innovation instead of creation.  So, I plan to take the world of concert planning and revolutionize it. I want to reinvent the concert experience, make it something that everyone recognizes but is just different enough that everyone wants to experience it even more.  I’m not sure exactly where I’ll go but I know that I want to bring music to the people in the most exciting ways possible.

I’ve been very grateful that PSU has given me the opportunity to follow my dreams.  I’m excited that this opportunity seems be ever-growing and more people will be allowed to follow their dreams soon.  I think that the new “clusters” system that is being introduced is a smart and innovative approach at Interdisciplinary Studies in the school, I just hope that it is done right.  Right now, it could go in a number of directions and some of those will crush dreams rather than let them flourish. The school is at a turning point and I look forward to seeing the directions that it takes this new system.  Things are a-changin’.

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