2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The strongly "paradigmatic" or “high-consensus” nature of STEM fields—characterized by well-established theories, high agreement among practitioners about accepted topics and methods, clear disciplinary boundaries, and standardized practices— can create cognitive and cultural barriers to interdisciplinary STEM graduate student identity development and motivation.

To explore these barriers, this paper presents a longitudinal study, a secondary analysis of an existing data set, to explore how STEM graduate students' interdisciplinary development evolves over enrollment in an Interdisciplinary Disaster Resilience (IDR) program. Utilizing Oyserman and James's Future Possible Selves (FPS) framework, we analyze multiple annual interviews for each student, focusing on three key aspects of FPS: self-perception as an interdisciplinary scholar, desire to be an interdisciplinary scholar, and perceived possibility of becoming an interdisciplinary scholar. We employ pattern coding and thematic trajectory analysis to visualize and interpret the dynamic changes in these motivational components over time.

Our preliminary findings illuminate three distinct developmental trajectories, illustrated by three individual cases: 1) the "growth alignment pattern," where students show synchronized progress across all dimensions of interdisciplinary development; 2) the “transformation alignment pattern,” where students move from complete resistance to acceptance across all three dimensions with at least one dimension shows a sharp change, and 3) the "mixed progress pattern," where students experience fluctuating self-perceptions while maintaining stable desire and possibility assessments. Findings demonstrate how students negotiate between their STEM professional identity and emerging interdisciplinary identity, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary graduate education. This study contributes to understanding interdisciplinary identity development in STEM education and offers methodological insights for analyzing qualitative longitudinal data. The results have implications for interdisciplinary program design and suggest potential intervention points to support students' development.