Is there such a thing? Even as an undergrad, I’m finding the areas I want to study fall under two or three different departments. Were I to pursue a PhD, is there a way to accommodate this, or do I have to just pick one department and make the best of it?
IANAPh.D, but I suspect that the department housing most of the classes you take would be the one granting the Doctorate.
Is there any professor at any university who agrees with you that the particular combination of subjects that you are interested in is, in fact, a single coherent topic that ought to be studied at one time? If not, there’s no chance that you’ll be able to do a joint Ph.D. in those subjects. It’s possible that you could get a Ph.D. in one subject and then another Ph.D. in another subject (at the same or a different university), but that’s going to be hard.
You usually pick one major professor from one department, but it is not uncommon at all to have the rest of your committee be from other departments. Mine had from two different departments, and two different areas in each department. The main focus, though, was centered on one department.
But it all varies by university, and different universities have different standards for their PhDs. You can ask the graduate school or the departments about their specific requirements.
I’m still interested in general answers, but I’ll be more specific about my area. I’m interested in the neurological and psychological effects (especially any permanent changes, and ways of testing and measuring potential effects) of various mind-body techniques, including meditation, yoga, dance, certain sports, Feldenkrais, etc. This seems to primarily fit between psychology and neuroscience, which are different departments at my university, although they do, in fact, have a graduate but no undergraduate program called “integrative neuroscience” that bridges those two departments. But it also ties in with somatic learning, biophysics, sports medicine, religious studies, and sports medicine.
I’m also curious, as it seems like many students just do their thesis on some aspect related to their sponsor’s research - can a student do a topic that is unrelated to their sponsors? And how does the money situation work? Some work is purely academic, but a lot of research requires equipment or materials. Are there grants for graduate research?
Business Ph.D.s will often draw heavily on coursework in other departments.
For example:
In my world of molecular biology, interdisciplinary thesis projects are not unusual. Usually, it involves some sort of applied math or computer science to model some biological process or better analyze genetic sequences.
Every adviser will give you a different amount of independence. Again, in my field, the adviser will fund your tuition and stipend from their research grant to study X, Y, and Z. Thesis projects will typically take established work in the lab in a new direction (what is the relationship between X and some other topic Q?)
You can get independent funding as a graduate student, however. Various doctoral training fellowships will completely cover tuition and stipend. Since you’re “free” to any lab you might join, you can have a lot more freedom to pick an adviser and a research topic. The NSF and NIH both have fellowships that you can apply for. You can apply for the NSF fellowship before you even start a PhD program, and again in the first year of the program. In contrast, the NIH fellowships typically want a thoroughly developed research proposal with some preliminary data, so most people apply after they’ve started their thesis project.
Missed edit:
Now, a fellowship won’t cover other research expenses, but if you have a fellowship a lot of advisers will happily find some way to cover other costs as long as your research has some minimal connection to their grants.
Also you should look for “umbrella programs”, which cover several different departments. My particular program covers several smaller departments, basically covering everything on reductionist side of biology. You’ve found one, but there are a lot more. Umbrella programs also typically have the virtue of letting you do short rotation projects in several labs, which really helps you pick out a topic and an adviser that you can deal with for six years. (You might end up hating the actual day-to-day work of some topic that you’re now considering, and a lot of potential advisers are total assholes.)
Italics added.
What does this mean?
Not only NIH and NSF have programs for graduate research, but you can look into each university graduate school, as they can also offer some scholarships/grants, including some departamental grants. Also, your major professor may cover part of your research. For example, they may cover the research costs while some other fund covers your stipend. It all varies by program and school.
Many students do their work in an aspect of their major professor (sponsor) because:
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It is, after all, the part that the sponsor knows the best. If you want a good mentor in X, well, someone whose entire work has been done on X is probably a good person to have.
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They already are established and may have multi-million grants, hence, working on some aspect of a bigger project guarantees funding and materials. It is harder to do a lot of in-depth research with limited budget (I should know, I did it).
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It is also “easier” to finish quicker and with some results. Exploring the complete unknown is hard. It is helpful when you’re dealing with some small unknown aspect, but where the techniques, procedures, protocols, machines, materials, reagents, and human resources (lab techs) are already there, at your fingertips, efficient and plentiful.
Again, interdiciplinary majors are not unknown or weird, but you should look up particular schools that you may be interested in and do your research and comparison, as programs vary.
It’s highly dependent on the school. At some of the universities I’ve worked at, it was quite doable. I even had one student working towards one for a time.
Myself, I was considering doing a joint masters degree way back when. Went over to see the grad dean. He was quite interested in it. They hadn’t approved one before but thought they might be a good idea. (A bad experience with a prof in one of the departments put the kibosh on the idea.)
One rule of thumb I learned early on is that everything can be appealed. Don’t see a joint doctorate in the curriculum? Write up a request, get appropriate profs to sign off on it (advisors and chairs in both departments) and head on over to the grad school dean.
The main issues that need resolving: Qualifying exams: which ones in which department? (You want to avoid taking full tests in both areas.) Which courses are required? Who is going to be the Big Boss of the thesis committee? Stuff like that.
I can answer this (but definitively) only with respect to my own university (McGill U.). First off, a PhD is not granted by a department, but the university. The dean of the graduate school once mentioned to me that the only formal reason there is a graduate school is that unlike every other degree McGill awards is awarded by the University, not be the department.
I once had a student who had been out of college for 22 or 23 years and I was dubious whether he would be able to pass our qualifying exam, which is based mainly on undergraduate mathematics. And is considered very hard. Since he was primarily interested in applications to computer science, I offered him the choice of getting a degree in mathematics or a joint degree. The latter would have set up a committee of, IIRC, three people in math and two in CS. We would be responsible for setting up qualifying exams and all other aspects of his program.
So I think that answers the OP, if he were at McGill. How general this is I don’t know.
The end of the story is that he opted to stay in the math. dept. sailed through the qualifying exam and wrote what was apparently a brilliant thesis. Although I just found it too heavy in logic and CS to be able to read, the outside examiner, a highly rated logician, considered it excellent. But the guy couldn’t explain snow to an Eskimo, couldn’t get a teaching job, his wife had a high-paying job and he ended up as a house-husband.
Inter-departmental PhDs are common in the sciences. Indeed, that is the type of research we are all being pushed toward - the big societal questions of energy, aging, food security etc demand big science, cross-disciplinary approaches to make any real progress. Not scientists getting their heads down and ploughing their own niche areas.
As far as your second point goes, a potential PhD student setting their own research agenda, entirely separate from their advisor, between two departments hitherto un-connected? Unheard of IME. Given the vast scope of graduate research across the arts and sciences, no doubt it happens, but it would be extremely rare. For obvious reasons - the PhD is, at heart, a training exercise. You currently know bupkis. You have some ideas, which is a great sign, but it’s the fact that you’re having these ideas that is important, not their content. Your actual ideas are not yet at the level of total shite.
No Prof in their right mind is going to pay you to work in their lab to pursue your criminally-awful vision of inter-disciplinary research. Most couldn’t even if they wanted to, in my system, as not many people have 80 grand lying around to take a punt on a mad PhD student. What you need to do is get in a high quality lab run by someone known for nuturing grad student thinking. Get a discipline under your belt, publish well, so you are then working off a credible platform to explore research in the directions you’re fundamentally interested in. Either late in your PhD, or more realistically your postdoc, you can start to set a research agenda distinct from the lab you are working in.
I have an interdisciplinary PhD. However this was not my idea in the first instance - it was suggested to me by my advisor.
An advantage of interdisciplinary research is that it can be novel without being extremely specialised.
Whether it is available as an option to you will depend on the policies of your university and the departments in question, and their willingness to accommodate you.
My view is that it won’t hurt to ask. By which I mean meet the relevant members of staff and try to convince them of the merits of your idea.
I did research on a disease that my major professor didn’t work on. BUT, my specific question involved the cell and type of inflammation she specializes in. Also, I had a committee member from another department, who had worked with my disease before (from another angle), as well as others.
If I had done it all over again, I would have found something that was already set up. It may have been more “work”, but dammit, it would have been a breeze to work with something that had the techniques, reagents, protocols, etc. already worked out. I did a lot of stuff from scratch. It sucks.
My daughter is just about to get one in Psychology and Marketing. She’s the first to do this. Her adviser is in Psychology, but she has taught Marketing classes and done joint research with business school people.
So definitely doable, but it might take some networking.
I hold an interdepartmental PhD. The entire program, which no longer exists, was interdepartmental. Edited to add: and interdisciplinary, both in terms of the degree structure and the backgrounds of the faculty who taught the program. Faculty held appointments in individual departments but were allowed to do most of their teaching and service for the program. The practical effect was that once the budget crunch began, things began to fall apart, and as students we were severely underfunded with very limited teaching opportunities.
Also, it turns out that an interdepartmental program with only a handful of matching departments in the universe is death on the job market. I would have been better off doing the exact same thing with the exact same people through an established program.
My graduate program is in molecular biology, basically including anything with a focus on genes, proteins, or cells. The professors that are official program “trainers” are from about a dozen different departments. In addition to including the entirety of departments like “biochemistry” and “pharmacology” it also includes a number of faculty in comp sci, applied math, chemistry, or clinical research departments. Basically the program unites a number of departments that are independent mostly for historical reasons, but nowadays share common perspectives and techniques to answer questions in specific disciplines.
My program was structured in a similar manner. You could also do your research off-campus at places like the NIH in labs of researchers who were adjunct professors.
In the case of neuroscience, my university had a interdepartmental program. There were professors in the molecular and cell biology, computer science, engineering, psychology, nutrition, animal science, and linguistics departments, for example.
If I was the OP, I’d probably go to PubMed to see who is publishing research that is related to what I was interested in, see where they are, and find institutions that may have a suitable program.
Thanks for all the input. Another question - the thesis I have in mind I may get some support in actually being able to have some collaboration with a professor and a grad student to start the project as an undergrad. Would it make sense to just continue that once I graduate and go to grad school (same place) as one long project, or would it make more sense to break it up into separate stages, and just use one of the individual components as the basis for my actual grad thesis?