Interdisciplinarity for Graduate Students workshop
Based on the sustained high interest we see from graduate students looking for interdisciplinary opportunities, CIRCLE (MSU’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement) organized a workshop for graduate students to offer expert advice, a supportive community, and resources to help them identify their skills and strengths as interdisciplinarians and to articulate and frame them for the job market.
At this new workshop in Spring 2025, CIRCLE had the following goals for our participants::
- Share experiences from interdisciplinarians’ research, teaching, and career experiences, including their challenges and benefits
- Encourage reflection about interdisciplinarity and career goals
- Develop a growth-oriented personalized plan for framing your interdisciplinary skills and experiences
- Identify relevant campus and public resources to further your interdisciplinarity
- Build interdisciplinary community
We also invited our participants to set their own goals and questions for faculty members.
Our interdisciplinary panel
Our panel of MSU interdisciplinarians included Lissy Goralnik (Community Sustainability/CANR), CIRCLE’s associate director for research; Garth Sabo (CAL), CISAH director; Louise Jezierski (Sociology/CSS & James Madison College), mentor of the IIT grad fellowship; and Gabe Ording (Entomology/CANR), CISGS director. They generously shared their interdisciplinary experiences as students themselves, on the job market, and in their academic roles including through tenure and promotion milestones and when hiring instructors. They were also frank about the challenges for interdisciplinarians within siloed institutions and gave advice related to building community, finding mentors, and making intentional choices about professional development, balancing areas of work and life, and following your values to find or build the right career fit. In our Q&A,
Resources
We shared the following resources that grad students, postdocs, and early career interdisciplinarians might find useful:
- A handout of Interdisciplinary and Career Resources from MSU and Beyond
- A worksheet you can use to create your personalized plan for interdisciplinary teaching. You can print and fill out these sections or download and edit the PDF.
Get involved with CIRCLE:
Graduate students interested in interdisciplinarity can apply for our CIRCLE graduate cohort fellowship, supported by the MSU graduate school. The deadline to apply for the 2026-27 cohort is March 13th, 2026. We have also developed a graduate affiliate program to better support your interdisciplinary skills development and build community with like-minded peers; for more information, contact CIRCLE’s leadership fellow Rafa Lembi (lembi@msu.edu).
MSU educators interested in deepening your involvement with CIRCLE can join our affiliate program. This community of interdisciplinary collaborators is open to MSU faculty, specialists, instructors, post-docs, and staff; you’ll have early access to news about our events, including workshops and write-ins, as well as opportunities for collaboration like our seed grant program.
Please contact Ellie Louson (lousonel@msu.edu) for any questions about CIRCLE, the above opportunities, or nterdisciplinary teaching at MSU. As CIRCLE’s associate director for teaching and learning, I organize programming and resources to support MSU educators’ skills development in interdisciplinary teaching and course design as well as our mentorship activities for graduate students.