2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In light of the grand challenges and big ideas associated with the next generation of research, interdisciplinary graduate programs are on the rise. These programs are seeking to prepare the future professoriate with the ability to span and collaborate across disciplines, knowing that existing disciplinary programs do not always provide these professional development skills outside of more traditional expertise, particularly in STEM. Prior research has elucidated key barriers to the success of these interdisciplinary programs in terms of sustainability and academic excellence over time, highlighting the siloed nature of universities, conflicting policies and expectations across disciplines, as well as resourcing challenges (Welch-Devine et al., 2018). But, efforts tend to take a quantitative approach, usually focusing on educators’ perspectives on student development and research output and graduation rates as markers for success alone. As such, student voices tend to be left out, and whether these interdisciplinary graduate programs are enabling students to transition to interdisciplinary career research is a question left unaddressed.

In an effort to expand definitions of what makes an interdisciplinary program effective, this paper is grounded in Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and investigates what graduate students in an interdisciplinary graduate program focused on disaster resilience have to say about what influences their preparation for cross-disciplinary research collaborations after graduation. This conference paper asks, (1) what influences graduate students’ abilities to develop a strong sense of interdisciplinary scholar identity, critical to self-efficacy and professional development, as they become professors in interdisciplinary spaces, and (2) what are graduate students’ perceptions of the interrelationship between various layers of their academic environment (i.e., microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem) and their interdisciplinary scholar professional identity development? This study takes a qualitative approach to assess interdisciplinary scholar professional development, using 48 semi-structured interviews across three cohorts (i.e., 24 participants where the first cohort consisted of 9 students, the second cohort of 3, and the third of 12) and three years (i.e., some students have multiple interviews, providing longitudinal data) to extend previous inquiry by shining a light on student-identified constraints and enablers of interdisciplinary research at the graduate level.

Ultimately findings on these influences on interdisciplinary professional identity development suggest that the cultural and historical background of universities as sites of disciplinary, department-driven initiatives, serves to challenge interdisciplinary graduate students seeking dissertation mentorship, paid work, and collaboration experience while building their professional identities as researchers and studying answers to grand challenges. The supports and barriers to this professional identity development process highlight the need for structural change within higher education institutions towards policies and procedures that better incentivize interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service for both graduate students and their faculty.