Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies at University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

ISF is an interdisciplinary major and a research-driven program of liberal education. It has been ranked the top personalized major offered at US universities and colleges. ISF offers students the unique opportunity to develop an individualized cross-disciplinary research program that includes a course of study and a senior thesis. The course of study is made up of courses taken in the social sciences, the humanities, and/or the professional schools and colleges, alongside the required courses in ISF.  The capstone experience is a scholarly, rigorously-researched, 40-page required senior thesis, which represents a sustained inquiry in the social sciences or humanities based on original, cross-disciplinary research.

ISF has identified a number of interdisciplinary research fields that have engendered excellent scholarship and attracted students across campus. ISF students may pursue other research fields identified in consultation with ISF faculty and academic advisers. The already-defined ISF research fields provide models and resources about scholarly interests. The research fields found on the ISF website are there to help ISF students identify their own research interests and customize their own research program and course of liberal arts study.

Declaring the Major

Students may apply to the major once per semester. The application deadline is approximately the end of the sixth week of the semester. Students are encouraged to meet with an ISF faculty adviser well in advance of the application deadline date. The application package should consist of a well-conceived research program, including a proposed course of study and an intellectual justification of their proposed study. Research programs must be interdisciplinary, integrating methodological or theoretical approaches from at least three academic disciplines (departments or programs). Interdisciplinary work may be comparative, historical, regional, thematic, or problem-focused. The research program should not replicate an existing major. The purpose of the ISF major is to allow undergraduates to combine work across disciplines in courses and with faculty where no other structured program exists. Finally, the research program must be feasible, and the senior thesis must answer a manageable research question in a semester's hard work (ISF 190). Each student's proposed research program is discussed with and approved by a faculty adviser to assure feasibility, but the final responsibility is the student's.

The nature of the major requires repeated elaboration of the proposed research program, course of study, and senior thesis that best combine students' individual research interests and the ISF program goals. Students are assigned an advisor upon acceptance into the major, although faculty members outside ISF may serve as advisers when appropriate, as approved by the ISF director.

Honors Program

All honors students enroll in the senior thesis seminar with other majors (ISF 190).  Students seeking honors must identify and seek out senate faculty members from other departments, ideally members of the ISF Faculty Advisory Board, to serve as second readers. Students must then let their ISF 190 instructor know that they intend to pursue honors in the major, and will give the name of their second reader to the ISF 190 instructor. Their grades in ISF 190 will be constituted by an average of grades assigned by the ISF 190 Instructor and the second readers.

Students eligible for honors must have an overall grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.6, including grades in ISF courses, at the beginning of the semester in which they enroll in ISF 190. Students in the honors option will be nominated for a degree of honors (honors, high honors, highest honors) by the ISF instructor, the second reader, or another ladder faculty member. The assessment of the degree of honors will be made by an ISF Honors Committee consisting of no fewer than two teaching faculty of the ISF Program and two academic senate members under the oversight of the ISF director. The ISF Honors Committee will use the criteria of scholarly originality, methodological sophistication (including interdisciplinarity), the quality of source interpretation, and excellence in writing and argumentation to adjudicate the degree of honors to be conferred.

Minor Program

There is no minor program in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Visit Program Website

The Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major (ISF) is a unique major on campus in that it requires students to engage in a major research project. This enables them not only to engage in qualitative and/or quantitative research but also to organize, synthesize, and communicate"in oral and written form"relevant data and results against the background of evolving theories and key concepts in the social sciences and/or humanities. As student research interests change in relation to larger patterns of social, cultural, and technological transformations, the department carefully monitors existing methodological courses to allow for ongoing flexibility with regard to innovative key concepts and new theoretical tools.

Learning Goals for the Major

1. Develop strong interdisciplinary research skills by creating a course of study in the context of which students can explore new phenomena, problems, themes, and issues pertaining to larger social, cultural, technological, and historical transformations.
   • Develop research question against the background of at least three disciplinary fields.
   • Learn to develop a research proposal, which integrates multilingual assets and/or multicultural capacities and/or fieldwork experiences or internships.
   • Gain excellent skills to access library services.
   • Develop structure of research thesis, argument, and bibliography.
   • Gain historical and geographical knowledge of relevance to the research project.
   • Link undergraduate research interests to post-graduation plans for graduate school and/or professional life.
2. Acquire awareness of methodological approaches in the social sciences and/or humanities in order to apply interdisciplinary methods and key concepts to the study and analysis of a particular social or cultural phenomenon under conditions of larger social and global transformations.
   • Learn about the most important theoretical traditions of the transatlantic social sciences and/or humanities.
   • Study central concepts embedded in the dominant social science methodologies and or humanities methodologies.
   • Explore new social theories emerging from the larger context of global and technological transformations.
   • Participate in the expansion of conceptual innovation and creativity through the exploratory formation of new concepts with the capacity to empirically grasp new social and technological phenomena.
3. Expand critical reading, thinking, analytical, and technological skills acquired in upper division courses through their application in the context of the research project.
   • Explore extent, relevance, and limits of traditional conceptual apparatuses to ongoing undergraduate research project.
   • Evaluate quality of arguments, ideas, and concepts in support of the thesis.
   • Translate ideas and concepts into a variety of environments in relation to the thesis.
   • Pursue field work abroad if applicable.
   • Integration of technological innovations, networks, and the internet in the expansion of critical acquisition of knowledge in a global, informational, and networked world.
4. Demonstrate organizational, argumentative, multilingual, and communicative skills through successful design, structuration, execution, and presentation of a major interdisciplinary research project.
   • Organization of research data, argument, and theoretical framework.
   • Integration of assets and capacities in the research project.
   • Communicate research results on the basis of multimedia technologies.
   • Preparation of thesis in print media.