Contrasting Approaches to Interdisciplinarity at Doctoral Level - Students Experiences

The sheer complexity of nowadays real-world problems poses research questions that cannot be solved by a single field or person. As the need of engagement with other disciplines has become crucial, interdisciplinarity has also become a major topic in discussions of knowledge production and research funding, and even a buzzword in academic and political discourses.<br> Many are the universities around the world that have responded to these societal demands establishing means to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary research. In the European doctoral landscape these programs have taken the form of doctoral schools and colleges which run parallel to the traditional doctorate. These new doctoral structures provoke questions about the implications of interdiscipinarity research, training, and pedagogy; as well as on the opportunities and challenges that students face during doctoral training.<br> In order to analyze interdisciplinarity at doctorate level this study was conducted in a set of doctoral programs with contrasting structures and curricula to manage specialization and interdisciplinarity. Conscious of the importance of minimizing the bias of the sample, only doctoral programs established in the same university and in the same field were considered. Three doctoral programs in the field of Computer Science that run parallel in the same faculty were selected: a traditional European doctorate program, a multidisciplinary doctoral school and an interdisciplinary doctoral college.<br> This paper is based on the results of the analysis of semi-structured interviews with doctoral students. Nevertheless, this study is part of a mixed-methods project that encompasses a broader selection of methods and measurement strategies: the administration of surveys to stakeholders of the doctoral program and the study of the bibliometric social networks of doctoral students. This is complemented with the analysis of the formal definition of the doctoral programs and their actual implementation.