Doctoral students at Brown University are testing a new model for interdisciplinary studies that allows them to pair advanced degrees in sometimes-disparate fields, with the goals of broadening their knowledge and improving their marketability.
Advocates of the program, called Open Graduate Education, say it also helps students forge new ways of thinking about big and complex problems facing society. Participants in Brown’s program, which is now limited to about 10 Ph.D. students per year during a six-year pilot phase, enroll in both a doctoral program and a master’s program, pursuing both degrees simultaneously.
The program, now in its second year, received a $2-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The university, using the Mellon money and adding some of its own, pays for an extra year of stipend support for the students who participate, and covers tuition for their master’s program.
One student, Apollonya Porcelli, is combining a doctorate in sociology with a master’s degree in ecology. To understand fishery science, she studies both the groundfish species that will be part of her dissertation and also the social relations—the give and take between fisherman and scientist—that anchor the field.
As climate change and other global problems become more pressing, Ms. Porcelli said, a greater need will exist for researchers who understand how to navigate subjects other than their own.
“The longer you spend as just an ecologist or sociologist or geologist,” she said, “oftentimes it means the harder it is for you to communicate across the disciplines.”
Some students pick master’s programs similar to their doctoral programs, while others fuse novel pairings, like Egyptology and applied mathematics, chemistry and computer science, and engineering and archaeology and the ancient world.
Administrators say the model expands the breadth of students’ education, allows them to forge new ways of thinking about major problems, and makes them more employable in an increasingly interconnected world.
About half of incoming doctoral students indicate an interest in the project, said Vanessa Ryan, an associate dean of the graduate school. The university had 258 new Ph.D. students this past fall.
“There may be a generational change,” Ms. Ryan said. “Younger scholars recognize the value of being intellectually broad and having an intellectual range. This is something we want to support.”
Some students elsewhere take it upon themselves to find their own ways to marry a master’s degree with a Ph.D. Graduate programs in individual fields at some universities offer their Ph.D. students limited versions of dual-degree options, and many universities offer doctoral students opportunities to earn certificates in related fields.
But Brown administrators say their program appears to be the first universitywide effort to formalize a program that allows Ph.D. students to earn master’s degrees in unrelated fields.
Not Easy to Replicate
Advocates of dual-degree programs in graduate education applaud Brown’s efforts.
Merlin Chowkwanyun earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Pennsylvania while he was a doctoral student in history. The training, which he cobbled together on his own, allowed him to publish in both social-science and public-health journals and taught him biostatistics and quantitative methods.
Mr. Chowkwanyun, one of the authors of a recent column in The Chronicle about dual degrees in history, said he wished more universities would set up a formal structure to facilitate programs like Brown’s.
“It’s great if kids can do it on their own initiative and work it out like I did,” he said, “but it takes a lot of time and a lot of administrative haggling.”
But Brown’s approach may not be easy to replicate elsewhere or on a broad scale.
Institutions would need to commit to picking up the tab for the master’s degrees in times when budgets are already lean, or risk piling more debt on graduate students, whose borrowing is already at record levels. Graduate schools would need to ensure that both doctoral and master’s programs are fully in support of students’ dual pursuits, so that the students feel integrated into both programs. And some wonder whether depth might be lost in the pursuit of breadth as the students become spread thin.
Ms. Ryan said these are all concerns that graduate-school administrators thought about when they developed Brown’s pilot program. Depth, she said, isn’t lost because the requirements for each master’s and doctoral program remain the same. And administrators from each of the students’ programs have to sign off in support of the effort, so no campus unit is surprised by the student’s plans.
Peter Weber, a Brown chemistry professor, said Brown undergraduates have an unusual amount of control in designing their educations. Allowing students to create their own core curricula allows them to take ownership of their educational paths and sets Brown apart from most universities, Mr. Weber said.
When Mr. Weber became dean of the graduate school, in 2010, he said, he wanted to bring the spirit of Brown’s approach to undergraduate education to its graduate programs.
“Just knowing that you have that control over your education, that’s something that is satisfying to our students,” Mr. Weber said. “If you can infuse that kind of thinking in graduate education, that is to everybody’s advantage.”
Applicants to the pilot project are partly judged on how well they argue for the value of connecting the disciplines they propose pairing and how the master’s program would help with their career goals. Some set out to trod unpaved scientific paths with their choices, while others, like Arielle Schilit Nitenson, combine programs to gain skills. The third-year neuroscience Ph.D. student is pursuing a master’s degree in teaching.
“When I saw the email saying this program is now an opportunity,” said Ms. Nitenson, “I’m Jewish, but I almost felt like it was Christmas.”
Ms. Nitenson wants to show prospective employers that she is serious about research and teaching. She said she would not have been able to earn a master’s degree in teaching were it not for this program, because traditional programs would have required her to spend semesters teaching and away from research. Since both of her programs at Brown support her, Ms. Nitenson said, they offer her flexibility in how she meets their requirements, allowing her to focus on her research now and get her teaching in when she can.
Christian Casey is interested in applying a quantitative method to what he says has largely been a qualitative field. He wants to glean a better understanding of ancient Egyptian, a language that has been lost through the millennia. So while he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Egyptology he is also pursuing a master’s degree in applied mathematics. He wants to use data-mining to decipher puns and wordplay in ancient Egyptian that would give researchers a clearer picture about how the language was actually spoken.
“There’s a lot of disagreement and debate in Egyptology because you can’t really argue for anything without running up against a counterargument immediately,” Mr. Casey said. “I want to take the human element out of it, and do scientific experiments that can be repeated by other people.”
Problem-Solvers
Philip E. Lewis, vice president of the Mellon foundation, said he hopes Brown’s program can be a model for other institutions. The foundation will evaluate the program at the end of its pilot phase, and find out how students feel about the program after they have completed it, Mr. Lewis said.
He acknowledges that it might be easier for a place like Brown than it would be for a large state university to put this kind of program in place. Brown has a relatively small graduate student body and is therefore relatively nimble. About 2,000 graduate students are enrolled at Brown, according to its website.
Brown’s program, Mr. Lewis said, “is in the spirit of carrying liberal-arts education into the graduate level, and thinking of graduate studies as a broad educational enterprise in which you can acquire a set of competencies and outlooks and possibilities for the future.”
Maura Borrego, the director of Interdisciplinary Graduate Education at Virginia Tech Graduate School, said that interdisciplinary efforts in graduate education are picking up as employers indicate that they like students who have successfully navigated new paths, read eclectic literature, solved different problems, and collaborated with different kinds of people.
Virginia Tech has 14 interdisciplinary programs, some of which will lead to certificates, and others with course and training requirements for students to voluntarily complete. These include sustainable nanotechnology, macromolecular science and engineering, and translational obesity research. The university also recently created an individualized interdisciplinary Ph.D. For that, students have to devise a detailed plan, Ms. Borrego said, including explaining why their proposed program doesn’t fit into an existing program, who their adviser would be, and where their financial support would come from.
Ms. Borrego said she’s noticing that the students who are drawn to interdisciplinary pursuits have more than just the job market on their minds.
“It’s less about jumping through hoops to get a high-paying job,” she said. “They want to do something meaningful and are trying to fix big problems such as food or health care. Interdisciplinary approaches seem to be, to me, very problem-focused.”
