Considering interdisciplinary majors

The question I ask students after we discuss their art is what, besides your art excites you? I ask because many students, and their parents, assume that studying art together with "fill in the blank" doesn't exist. It does, read on.

Here are just a few interdisciplinary majors that unite an art with either a humanities or a traditional STEM subject. Add to this list Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, and Art Management, where "art" can be music, dance, etc. Many colleges also allow students to create their own interdisciplinary majors, so if this is something you think will benefit you, make sure you research schools that allow you to do this. This past year we worked with a student interested in 3D backgrounds for games as well as ASL, she wants to create 3D ASL which would allow any movie, video or game to have accompanied sign language.

  • Playwriting, Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at Emory. This major connects the disciplines of theatre studies and creative writing to educate playwrights as writers and as theatre professionals. This major is for students who want to experience the full creative process, from conception to implementation of a production.

  • Fashion Media at Kent State. This minor connects students interested in both fashion and journalism to prepare them to enter the field of fashion journalism.

  • Business of Creative Enterprises at Emerson. Allows creative students interested in business to focus their studies on bringing new creative ventures to market.

  • Media Arts and Culture at Occidental. This major integrates media and production giving students the opportunity to learn new tools for digital scholarship, from podcasts and video blogs to GIS applications and VR. It is a great major for students who are interested in using technology to tell a story.

  • Medical Illustration at Rochester Institute of Technology and Life Sciences Illustration at Cleveland Institute of Art. This is a perfect major for a 2D or 3D artist interested in biology or physics. It is an art used by researchers to communicate and disseminate information related to biology, anatomy and general medical information.

  • Museums, Memory and Heritage at Tufts and Art Conservation at University of Delaware. This area of study combines a love of art together with history, writing, or chemistry. Students learn the institutionalization, contextualization and preservation of artifacts.

  • Music, Sound and Culture at Tufts. Similar to visual art conservation, this area of study relates to music preservation uniting areas such as composition, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance, psychology, technology, and theory to contextualize and institutionalize the history of music.

  • Design, History and Practice at The New School/Parsons. This interdisciplinary major allows students to combine studio art and liberal arts, where the first year is the Parsons Foundation Year course of study and then students can choose to focus on a liberal arts subject such as Curatorial Studies and a studio art such as Data Visualization.

I've highlighted some specific majors at various colleges but this is just a small sampling to get you thinking. Give me a call if you want to learn about an area of study that interests you.

Previous
Previous

Applying to Film School

Next
Next

What do you want application readers to learn about you?