4 minute read
Take an interdisciplinary approach towards your studies and careerYour Career Guide 2022
Paballo Abel Chauke - is a Training and Outreach Coordinator (Bioinformatics) at H3ABioNet.
Advertisement
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.
Especially for the South African employment milieu, we need to build a workforce that is able to mitigate the challenges they face and adapt quickly and successfully.
There are labour market constraints as stated above, and as such, many more students are and should be opting into postgraduate studies to upskill themselves and make themselves more competitive.
There are multiple and different Interdisciplinary scholarships that are available – where there is recognition of interdisciplinarity, especially at Masters and PhD level, both locally and internationally. These include and are not limited to the NRF, Commonwealth Scholarships, Rhodes Scholarships and DHET, just to name a few. One can use these scholarships to study a myriad of issues in different fields and contexts. Not to worry, there is a job or a business at the end of the cross-disciplinary tunnel, be it in corporate or university spaces.
The University of Cape Town has a growing number of interdisciplinary institutes and organisations, such as ACDI, Future Water and H3ABIONET amongst others, showing that the university is walking the talk when it comes to leading the change in terms of adopting and pioneering interdisciplinarity.
I am personally a proponent of interdisciplinarity in terms of studies, work, or life in general. I have seen the fruits of this fairly new paradigm shift in my own professional and academic life. I would thus strongly recommend and implore young, current, future and aspiring students to adopt interdisciplinarity in their studies, work and essentially their lives as complexity thinking is the way to go in this day and age, especially if we want to ensure we adapt to diverse, inclusive and exceptional work environments that espouse unity and excellence as important virtues.
