Postgrad possibilities
Take an interdisciplinary approach towards your studies and career Paballo Abel Chauke Paballo is a Training and Outreach Coordinator (Bioinformatics) at H3ABioNet.
Scholars, academics, researchers, scientists and students alike have increasingly realised, acknowledged and accepted that it is extremely difficult, if not near impossible, to fully know the world that we live in, as the world is a complex system and to begin to understand it, we need to adopt complexity thinking. Gone are the days when the divisions between different faculties, departments, and fields of study or employment trajectories, were meaningful and needed to be strictly policed and reified. That is because complexity thinking as posited by Paul Cilliers (1998) is a nouveau way of thinking about and understanding the world or complex phenomena such as living, social, ecological and economic systems such as our careers or fields of study, including ourselves as human beings. Human beings are complex systems that should not be boxed or limited by anything, let alone a career, job or field of study. As such, what you study in your undergraduate or postgraduate studies should not define your whole life or the destiny you journey towards. That is why
corporates, civil society, governments, businesses, and the private sector, including academia itself, are embracing and championing interdisciplinarity (underpinned by complexity thinking) as a way forward into our common envisioned future. Simply put, interdisciplinarity refers to the practice of drawing from, merging and mixing more than one discipline to achieve a certain goal, be it a study, course, research, and work amongst a whole litany of things that could adopt complexity. I have personal experience with interdisciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity (as some prefer to use), in that I studied three majors in my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, from different faculties, departments, and universities, in the natural and social sciences. The jobs I have worked in did not necessarily align with what I studied in direct ways, so I had to reinvent myself and tap into my agility and adaptability in the workplace.
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