The Value of Interdisciplinary Research
This past summer I got to take part in the Honors Summer Fellowship (HSF) program, which is designed to support and guide students while they get started on their undergraduate thesis work. The beauty of a program like HSF is all the extra stuff that comes along with it. You come in to spend time on your research and learn about how to write a thesis, and you certainly accomplish both of those things. Along the way, however, you learn so much about so many other things, and I think it is in these extra benefits that programs like HSF really shine.
A big takeaway from this summer for me was the experience of being a part of an academic community of peers and getting to work through the early stages of our projects together. One of the main reasons I wanted to apply to HSF was the interdisciplinary community it promised to provide. My department is quite small, so I really wanted to be around a group of people who were also going through the highs and lows of planning their projects and figuring everything out. There’s something special about being part of an interdisciplinary cohort that you just don’t get from any other kind of academic setting. People in your own field of study are great and it’s definitely important to have those connections, but it’s also incredibly helpful to sit down in a room full of people from a variety of background and hear ideas from all those different perspectives. Having to explain my research to people from biology to political science made me think a lot about my own ideas, and I’m grateful for that experience.
This leads into my other main takeaway from this summer: how important and rewarding it is to share your research with the public. With any big research project or academic endeavor, I think it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the wrong things. You start off a project with grand ideas, about why your work is important and why people should care about it, but then you actually start doing it. Some days the ideas just won’t come, or your research leads to a dead end, and you start to get bogged down by all the little details. You end up spending more time wondering why your experiment won’t work than you do wondering why the experiment is important in the first place.
As someone who didn’t come from an academic background, the broader meaning of academia has always been important to me. If I’m being completely honest with you, I didn’t realize that archaeology was a real field that anyone could study until I came here to Michigan. I knew that people dug up ruins and studied people who lived thousands of years ago, but it all seemed so academic and untouchable. People like me, from middle-class households, whose parents didn’t go to college, they couldn’t possibly do something like that! Yet, as part of HSF this summer, I got the opportunity to not only do my research, but also to share that research with other people, from toddlers to grandparents, and see how truly meaningful that could be. I think about how huge an experience like this would’ve been for me as a child or a young adult, and it makes all the work that myself and my other cohorts did that bit more special. Beyond just working on my thesis this summer, HSF gave me the opportunity to remember why I like doing this work and why it matters to me, and that’s not something I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d just sat alone writing all summer.
