Interdisciplinary

In the educational section of my resume it documents that, among other things, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Social Science with a minor in Criminal Justice. I earned this degree many years ago in a very disjointed and frankly accidental way. My college experience was a two-part drama that took seven years to complete. It began with a major in accounting, a choice that was made entirely based on the fact that I had done well in an accounting class in high school. I managed to complete the introductory course in accounting but I was then required to take several math courses in order to move forward in the accounting curriculum. These specific math courses were taught in the early morning and that schedule did not mesh well with my very active night life. So after attempting to get through these prerequisite courses several times and being forced to drop them because of chronic absenteeism I abandoned my pursuit of an accounting degree. My academic journey then wandered into the fields of study that my friends were pursuing. I took some history courses, a few economics courses, a criminal justice class, several philosophy courses and all of the universities required courses. All the while I was still classified as an accounting major.

Concurrent with my college experience, I worked in high-rise construction. I worked on jobs overseen by my father and uncle which allowed me to work part-time and attend school the other days. This work/academic coexistence went on for a couple years with work slowly making inroads into the academic part of the relationship. Eventually work took over and I stopped going to college all together. When I dropped out of college, I had amassed 101 units of college credits and the minimum number of credits required for graduation was 124. 

I was cruising along, working full-time and paying my bills when everything in my life came to an abrupt stop. I suffered a major knee injury which forced me to take a long hiatus from work. Facing the long lay-off, I decided to see if I could graduate from college. It seemed laughable at the time because I was an accounting major with one accounting class on my transcript but I made my way over to the university on my crutches to talk to a counselor about my options. Upon looking at my transcript the counselor determined that because I had taken so many difficult upper-division courses, in so many disciplines of study, that by completing three specific core courses I could get a degree in Interdisciplinary Social Science with a minor in Criminal Justice. The rest of the credits required to graduate could be amassed by taking electives. So I enrolled in the three necessary courses, filled out the rest the units with others, and got permission from the university to take all 23 units in the same semester. One semester later I was a college graduate. A few months following my graduation from college I return to work in construction where I subsequently became a journeyman of my trade. Some years later, my life changed again and I no longer worked in construction. Today both my college degree and my journeyman-ship still make a major impact in my life and the reason is simple: it is because the strength and fluidity of life is rooted in its interdisciplinary nature.

Every individual’s unique journey can be superficially documented in a resume that highlights specific periods of time such as employment history or levels of academic achievement. Between those lines, subconsciously each person knows what they have done and for the most part what they are capable of doing. But society at large does not know the nuances of each person’s life and so in an attempt to rank people, it places certain values on skills and achievements. Over time, this somewhat random creation of a hierarchy of skills begins to erode the subtleties of historical value. Most people slowly begin to define themselves with a snap shot of current life position. That is why change, voluntary or required by circumstance, is so daunting and frightening. We disregard the interdisciplinary aspect of our lives. We discount and even forget what we have done and the skills we have acquired. It could be something we learned in a seminar or class, a job we had when we were young, a hobby that became a passion or the fact that we speak two languages fluently. All these factors, our individual interdisciplinary nature is really who we are and the foundation of who we can become.

I graduated from college with a degree that was randomly built and then finished with a few specific classes. It does not diminish the value of my accomplishment. It shows that I worked hard in many different fields of study and in the end had something to show for it. Life is that way. Change can come at any time and it may take a couple of things to cobble a future together but in most cases the bulk of work has been done. In the end, it shows that our lives are not a snap shot but a movie and that movie has an almost infinite number of possible and viable sequels.