Forcing your brain to find connections leads to new, weird and wonderful insights that could potentially help solve a complex problem. Although I’ve not been meaning to put you off LIS, it’s okay if I have. It’s not for everyone, but you may not know until you try. I’m still not sure if it’s for me, but the pieces are slowly falling into place.

At LIS, we think there’s a straightforward case for an interdisciplinary degree: problems are interdisciplinary, so our curriculum should be too. When it comes to making the case for interdisciplinary learning in schools, however, we have to seriously consider the many other competing demands on schools’ time. When so much effort is required to help students master ‘the basics’, why complicate matters by trying to bring subjects together?

I remember my mum saying those words to me when, aged 25, I decided to veer off the track of an already established career in technology and study psychotherapy. Neither word ‘polymath’ nor ‘interdisciplinary’ featured much in my upbringing, and the idea that someone could want to be more than one thing didn’t ever occur to my job-for-life parents.

In the past year I have had the unique opportunity to craft a Student Experience (SXP) program from scratch. The task ranged from very exciting and educational to somewhat frustrating. However, true to my narrowed-down explanation, it has mostly been fun. I have travelled below the streets of London, crawled through strangers’ gardens after dark, folded 2nd hand clothing until my hands cramped up, and built spaghetti and marshmallow towers. Most of all however, I have stared at spreadsheets. No one quite prepares you for how much planning it takes to have fun.

So we created something called the LIS Network: a growing group of organisations who want to use interdisciplinarity to make change. These organisations span the public, private, and third sectors. In other words, we work with people from government, business, and charities, to make sense of complexity and find opportunity within.

Remember negative thoughts are only thoughts, NOT facts. Don’t be hard on yourself – there’s no benefit at all.

Formerly one of FutureLearn’s founding team and Chief Product Officer, Matt helped establish the platform as the biggest European Massive Open Online Course provider. He has since become an advisor and coach to a variety of EdTech startups and scale ups like OpenClassrooms, Microverse and Academy, supporting the development of a product mindset and the creation of new educational products. He is also Faculty Lead for Emerge Education’s Product-Market Fit Academy.

This year we’re celebrating UK Pride Month by sharing some of the LIS team’s favourite books, films, documentaries, podcasts, artists, and exhibitions either by LGBTQI+ creators or about LGBTQI+ themes. We hope you enjoy them!

Sasha has been the Director of the UK’s Social Mobility Commission since 2019. The Social Mobility Commission is an advisory government body tasked with assessing and improving social mobility across the UK.