“Ang kurso mo ay AB IS? International Studies ba ‘yon?”
Explaining what my course is can be difficult—the phrase “AB Interdisciplinary Studies (IS), with tracks in Communication and Information Design” is admittedly loaded. More often than not, people who ask me what IS is merely nod in response, eyebrows drawn with confusion as I attempt to explain the course’s intricacies. I’ve learned to create a spiel in preparation for cases like this, but lately it has been reduced to being called a “mini-double-major,” the easiest way for me to explain it. However, in the times that the person I am talking to does know what IS is, it often comes with the negative connotation that my course is for wide-eyed freshmen who are still unsure of their career path, thus the need for two ‘general’ disciplines in their course.
When I entered Ateneo in 2015, I was admittedly that wide-eyed, AB IS freshman. Call me a needle in a haystack, but I willingly chose IS as my course after having studied the course catalog inside and out, and eventually deciding that IS is the course for me. At the time, I was still completely unaware of the stigma that came with being an IS student. I only knew what I wanted my tracks to be right away and chose Communication and Information Design without any second thoughts. I was proud and excited to be an IS major, until suddenly I wasn’t.
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Ateneo is exactly what its name implies: the integration of the two disciplines your choice. What left me embarrassed to be an IS major was the quiet “Oh…” I would receive from other Ateneans I would come across. They would assume that I wasn’t sure of my career path, and that I would eventually shift out of IS once I did find out what to do in life.
The 10,000-hour rule, which was conceptualized by author Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book Outliers (2008), states that in order to be considered an expert in a single task, one must practice it for 10,000 hours. Though there is truth to Gladwell’s rule, it also begs the question—does devoting 10,000 hours to hone one task or skill truly reap benefits if other skills may remain undeveloped? Though there is nothing wrong with specializing at one thing, there is a danger in forgetting that there is something good in being the opposite—a generalist. Similarly, so much importance is put on courses that specialize in one discipline, that it consequently creates the stigma that wanting to learn more than one discipline makes you look messy and undecided. Explaining IS was hard as a freshman who just wanted to fit in, but I stuck with IS and eventually discovered the beauty behind being a generalist, a true “jack of all trades, master of none.”
When I started taking my major electives for IS, I learned that it is one thing to learn two disciplines at once, but it is another to be able to integrate those two disciplines—and that is exactly what Ateneo’s IS program prides itself in. Steve Jobs earned his success by combining design with hardware and software, while Elon Musk integrated a myriad of disciplines (physics, engineering, programming, and design, to name a few) to get where he is today. An educator named Ernest Boyer once said that “the future belongs to the integrators,” and personally, it feels great to be one of them.
Slowly but surely, the quiet Oh’s have turned into “Oh, that’s such a nice course!” from older Ateneans who have come to realize what IS is really about. The nomadic life of an IS student, taking classes with different blocks every semester, is assuring in its own way—it opens up the world to us and introduces us to all sorts of people and situations.
As graduation and job application season looms nearer, I’m no longer nervous that employers will question what AB Interdisciplinary Studies is when it shows on my résumé. My course will always need explaining, but I will gladly take that mouthful of an explanation over anything else.
