About

Overview of Program

In interdisciplinary liberal arts, you will build an individualized interdisciplinary liberal arts experience by creating your own unique curriculum. You choose the classes and extra-curricular opportunities that suit who you are, where you are going, and what you eventually want to do after graduation.

Degree Information
ILA Program Press-Kit

What is Interdisciplinarity?

An emerging academic field that exists between or outside academic disciplines, as opposed to being within any one of the 14 disciplines that make up the College of Liberal Arts. It teaches a specific critical approach and awareness that integrates different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies in a practice we call integrative thinking.

Utilizes critical practices and methodologies that move across knowledge formations for the purpose of achieving an enlarged multi-disciplinary understanding.

Sees successful intelligence as having three modes: creative, analytical, and practical.

Works to build bridges between knowledge formations, disciplinary perspectives, critical practices, and the expressive/artistic modalities.

Three Core Values

Flexible

Our major is flexible. It never remains the same nor is it ever the same. Each of you make it your own major by choosing your own liberal arts courses and experiences and it changes each time you change.

Diverse

Our major offers you the most diverse academic experience now available on campus. You can choose courses from 14 different liberal arts disciplines. You can choose any combination of academic topics, performance or visual arts, professional internships or alternative learning opportunities (e.g., study abroad, practicums, alternative spring break) you want. It all works with this major.

Practical

You’ll end up with a degree that is not only satisfying but also practical. You will gain the exact key career skills 21st century employers desperately want from college graduates.

Skills Learned

  • Conduct research and use it in an evidence-based analysis for informing yourself and others.
  • Identify, formulate, analyze, and solve complex problems individually and in collaborative environments.
  • Think creatively and find innovative solutions to existing realities.
  • Written and verbal communication skills. 
  • Key interpersonal skills and the ability to prosper in all kinds of work environments. 
  • An understanding of the role media plays in the workplace and how to use it expertly to effectively communicate and exchange information.

Our Community

You will be studying with students and faculty who love the challenge of engaging issues, problems, and understandings from a variety of perspectives. We enjoy exploring the entire gambit of a liberal arts experience, one that includes creative expression or performance, artistic pursuit, or any number of intellectual interests outside or between disciplines. We are, in short, curious about a lot of things, up for anything, and willing to go just about anywhere a major can take us.

A great way to learn more about our community is through the Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts newsletter. The newsletter is sent out once per semester and explores the people, initiatives, and events in our Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts community. Read the current edition Spring  2024 ILA-Newsletter

You can also read our previous newsletters using the links below: