I listened to a speaker the other day extol the virtue of transdiscplinary students. These students, he proclaimed, used tools from one field to impact signficant findings in another field. He was in an administrative position, and hoped to use that power to make all students transdisciplinary.

I don't agree with this approach.It is, of course, not my call, but I have found that this kind of overarching knowledge is not worth the effort it takes to gain it. Here is why:

There is only so much information a student can absorb in a day, week, month, year, Ph.D time period. You could, of course, get even less information, but there is a certain max capacity that exists. We work 100 hour weeks, sometimes staying up for 3-5 days in a row, hoping that we'll be able to absorb even 1/2 of what we're expected to know. Many graduate students take medications to help anxiety, stress, and depression. I for one can say that graduate students live on such low wages that they are sometimes homeless. We don't do this because it's always fun. We do it because we want to be able to have our work and our lives be gratifying. We want to push the boundary of what people know and what they can know. We do it because we have souls that seek deeper innovation and understanding.We accept that it will be hard and stressful because we don't really like living in a way that doesn't spurn us to learn something new every day. It's how we are made.  That being said: we are also human. We need to sleep, exercise, eat healthy foods, have shelter, spend time with those close to us, and sometimes just chill out. And actually, this rant does relate to what I will say:

Graduate degrees-- masters and to a greater sense, the Ph.D.-- are subject-specific. They are designed to make you an expert in a specific field. I don't deny that interdisciplinary skills are useful-- and that's why most committees put at least one "out of field" person on the committee-- but the very designation of having an "out of field" requisites that there is an "in field. Universities and colleges are sources of collarboration-- specific places where academics can get together with other academics with specific knowledge in other field, and work more productively.

So assume we have a limited quantity of knowledge that can be obtained, and 1 main field, and 9 tangential fields to which it can be allocated. A transdisciplinary student might give 40 percent of that knowledge to the main field, allocating ~6% to each of the tangential field. A regular student, on the other hand, might give something like 75-80 percent to the main field, and only ~3% to the tangential fields. Come exam and production time, it's clear to me that a specific approach is better. You get nearly twice as much knowledge about your main field, which is what you came to study. At a range of 3-6% your knowledge of tangential fields isn't really very significant anyway. Why press it?

This man cited a few specific examples of times when it would be good to be transdisciplinary. What if a technology were used in one field that could apply to another? What if a student attended another disciplines conferences and met new colleages?  But these things could be achieved through collaboration and networking as easily as through mandated transdisciplinary programs of study. If the Ph.D. is supposed to be a transdiscplinary degree, then we should never have to defend our work alone against committees of scholars with specific interests. Instead, there should be some kind of collaborative debate or application construction. If a defense is the way to go, then the Ph.D. should be specific, and specific to the student's interests and abilities. In terms of the world advancement, I can't say I would believe that the world would get better if a whole lot of people knew a little about everything. Not to mention negotiating would be nightmarish. Rather, having collaborations between specific knowledge benefits everyone.

So that's what I have to say of this.