Multidisciplinary Professionals, the Future Is Calling

Wu Peiru, a 30-year-old Taiwanese graduate student in business administration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began diversifying her skill set at an early age to better position herself for the job market.

Wu, whose mother works in direct sales, had always been determined to work in sales, but didn’t do as well as she hoped on Taiwan’s joint university entrance exam. The only major option available to her turned out to be in the Russian department at National Cheng­chi University. Little interested in being a translator or diplomat, she immediately began thinking about transferring into another department.

Though a degree in Russian had initially seemed to offer few career options, Wu realized her studies were fortuitously timed: Russia was in the midst of its preparations to join the World Trade Organization, and the job market looked unusually good. She concluded that it made more sense for her to fill out her Russian studies with courses in business and management than it did to change majors. Once she had made her decision, she set her sights on adding a second major and began working on her English language skills to meet the necessary requirements.

University students are embracing new challenges into their lives by exploring classes outside their primary fields of study. In so doing, they are developing the kind of multidisciplinary skills they hope will pave the way to a dream career.

One year later, Wu applied for double-major status with the school’s Department of International Business. Once she was accepted, she had to take more than 70 credit-hours of international trade courses on top of her Russian. But her hard work paid off, earning her job offers from two tech titans: Asus and Quanta. “If I hadn’t added the international business major and had only studied Russian, I’m afraid I would have had a hard time landing a sales job with a major technology company,” says Wu.

The 26-year-old Lin Yingzi’s double major in agronomy and sociology at National Taiwan University also opened doors for her.

Lin had been interested in the humanities and the arrangement of spaces since high school, and in college began auditing courses offered by both the sociology department and the graduate institute of building and planning. These strengthened her interest in sociology, which led to her decision to add a second major in that field. Interested in a variety of sociological theories, Lin dabbled in activism in an effort to bring her ideals to life. She even took part in the Wild Strawberries student movement.

After graduating in 2009, Lin used her knowledge of agronomy and sociology to secure an international internship. The position, jointly sponsored by Continental Engineering Corporation’s Hao Ran Foundation and a foreign NGO, took her to Brazil, where she worked for the Instituto Paulo Freire (IPF).

Within six months, Lin was bringing local teachers, students, and residents together for dialogue by arranging lectures, discussions, and film-related talks. She was also working with IPF staffers on surveys in local neighborhoods and on organic farms. Her group’s objective was to heighten civic consciousness in a way that would encourage Brazilians to improve their living environment and resolve educational issues.

Lin had been fascinated by participatory design theory during her undergraduate studies. When she went on to advanced studies in landscape architecture in the Netherlands, she looked backed to her “roots” in agronomy and sociology for her master’s thesis, choosing “urban agriculture” as its subject.

Lin’s current boss, the owner of an urban landscaping company, was impressed by her expertise and hired her to study the feasibility of urban farms in Taiwan, where interest in the issue of food security is on the rise.

Professionals working in the multi­media field who want to produce attention-getting work must be well versed in imaging technology and possess a solid artistic sensibility. The photo shows the Pavilion of Dreams at the Taipei International Flora Expo.

Double-majoring has provided many students with a shortcut to their dream job. According to both businesses and job-market experts, employers are most interested in people whose expertise runs deep and covers multiple fields.

In his 2006 book A Whole New Mind, author Daniel Pink posits that “multi” is the most important word in today’s world: businesses are focused on the “multifunctional,” society on the “multicultural,” and entertainment on “multimedia.” The modern-day explosion of information and analytical tools requires individuals who are empathetic and rational in equal measure, people capable of simplifying complexity, demonstrating compassion, and building narratives, to seek happiness for themselves and others, and to discover meaning in their lives and work. These are precisely the sorts of skills that individuals with multidisciplinary backgrounds have in abundance.

According to a report from 104 Job Bank, people with multidisciplinary backgrounds have high levels of confidence. This results in job satisfaction rates six percentage points higher than those of their peers when faced with changes to a job description or a change of employment, and in promotion rates 29 pecentage points higher than those of their peers.

Ricky Hong, senior vice president of 104 Job Bank, says that a multidisciplinary background isn’t the only factor affecting a job seeker’s performance in today’s competitive market, but having a variety of skills certainly makes it easier for applicants to stand out from the crowd.

Currently a very hot area, design in all its various forms provides students with fantastic opportunities to flaunt their multidisciplinary skills.

The trend has also been apparent at universities, which several years ago began introducing minors, mini-programs, and double majors aimed at broadening their students’ skill sets.

When Lee Si-chen became president of National Taiwan University in 2005, he loosened the requirements on double majors in an effort to boost interest in the less popular departments in the colleges of liberal arts, agriculture, and science. By calling for students to focus on their choice of school rather than department, he hoped to attract still greater numbers of outstanding high-school students to his university.

With the university’s encouragement, the number of NTU students applying for double majors rose from 466 in 1999 to 1,470 in 2013, a threefold increase. Fields that offered students better job prospects in the business world, such as economics, finance, and accounting, were particularly popular as second majors.

At National Chengchi University, roughly 1,000 students take on second majors every year. Jason Chan, the school’s dean of academic affairs, says that the school designed its double majors, minors, and mini-programs with a particular eye to providing humanities majors with more saleable skills, because such students tend to have a harder time finding jobs than science and engineering majors.

Providence University has been one of the most aggressive of Taiwan’s private universities at promoting similar policies.

In fact, Providence greatly eased the requirements for double majoring some 20 years ago, under the leadership of then-president Richard Lee. It went on to introduce a four-year double-major program in 2006. The program aims to pair less popular majors with more popular ones, giving rise to prepackaged dual-degree programs such as Taiwanese literature with mass communication, and financial and computational mathematics with either finance or computer science. These programs seek to brighten the employment prospects of students in less “hot” fields.

David Tseng, the school’s dean of academic affairs, recalls that the program had very pragmatic origins: it was intended to help unpopular departments recruit students.

Take, for example, Taiwanese literature, a relative upstart within the humanities. Although graduates of Taiwanese literature departments should be on an equal footing with those of Chinese literature departments—the departments have similar academic standing and overlapping faculties, and their graduates often find themselves competing with one another for the same jobs after graduation—the degree carries less prestige with employers. This makes it difficult for departments to recruit students, threatening their viability. Providence University therefore decided to establish a dual “Taiwanese literature and mass communication” degree aimed at giving students a leg up in the job market by giving them access to radio, television and film practicums.

But double majors aren’t without their problems. One of the most common is that required courses aren’t necessarily available when students need them, forcing them to postpone their graduation. Recognizing that some students may have difficulty affording additional semesters of study, the departments involved have developed course schedules that enable dual-degree students to graduate in four years. The departments also have established a mechanism that makes it possible for students to give up a double major if they feel a need to do so.

Although these “prepackaged” double majors don’t allow students to “mix and match” their own course of study, they do reduce the risk of graduating late.

According to Providence, students are very satisfied with its double-major system, and 20% now choose the dual-degree option. Meanwhile, the number of students giving up their second major has declined from 53% in 2009 to 30% in 2013 for those in the “Taiwanese literature and mass communication” program and from 59% (2009) to 28% (2013) for those majoring in financial and computational mathematics with finance or computer science.

Many people recognize that multidisciplinary capabilities will be important to the workers of the future, and the crucial to the world’s progress. Students who hope to ride the wave of globalization into that future would be well advised to utilize their campuses’ resources to broaden their skill sets.