Joining LIS. What an adventure it’s been so far.

Wellbeing is at the heart of student support here at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). It’s been vital to provide a safe and trusting space for students to speak about their mental health – in a way that works for them.

For one, this degree did not force me to pick one subject and stick with it. It didn’t limit my options in what I could study or what I could do after the degree; and in doing so it opened doors rather than closing others.

"I thought it wasn't a university for everyone by any means, but the problem-solving/ interdisciplinary approach I thought might be exactly right for my son. I know that my son felt more like he belonged there than any other university we visited."

Through this module we have been trying to understand the complex problem of inequality through our different disciplines. The choice was between network science and political economy and then neuroscience or linguistics.

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.