Hello, and welcome to the web page of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University.
The department offers two main programs: Watauga College, a residential living learning program for freshman and sophomore students, offering integrated general education and social sciences and the humanities, and the bachelor of arts in Interdisciplinary Studies, offering an array of fourteen concentrations united by a common core of courses.
Students and parents often ask us, "What is Interdisciplinary Studies?"
I like to use the analogy of vision. If you think about how a lizard sees, even though it has two eyes, it does not experience depth. Because the eyes are separated on its head and it cannot compare the information it gets from two eyes, a lizard lives in a flat world.
But human beings eyes are in the front of our heads, and our brains gets information about the same object from both eyes. By comparing that different information, our brain allows us to live in a depth world.
Interdisciplinary Studies works like that. It allows students to get more than one point of view on the same topic, and by comparing and contrasting, connecting and separating the information provided by separate disciplines, new dimensions of information appear, analogous to the dimension of depth that appears when the eyes become binocular.
Please enjoy your visit to our website, explore our pages, feel free to call us or email us if you have additional questions, and think about whether you would like to add those additional levels of experience and information to your life, that can be provided by Interdisciplinary Studies.
~ Dr. Richard Carp, Interdisciplinary Studies Department Chair
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