I love college. Essentially, I love to learn, to ask questions, and explore. One thing I really enjoy is the fact I'm no longer being taught everything, but learning how to teach myself as well as the tools to learn on my own.
Learning on my own becomes particularly useful as I realize, more and more, how atypical I seem to be within the fields I choose to study. As a starting point, my declared degree program--two courses shy of completion--is a bachelors of science in psychology with minors in anthropology, biological sciences, and sociocultural anthropology*. As such, most of my coursework is within the fields of psychology, anthropology, and biology with several courses being cross-listed for two or more of the fields.
I enjoy being a broad-based, physiologically grounded social science major most of the time, with a few exceptions. One of the nicer parts of my background is the fact all three of these fields are--at the theoretical level--quite integrated. When you attach the field of experimental economics and complexity studies in general, you find the major components of the current theoretical explorations of human social behavior as described often in the pages of Science, Nature, and other prestigious journals. My background--in conjunction with the accompanying reference library I've accrued--allows me to read and understand most articles and books across these fields**.
One type of exception happens when I find myself wanting to explore one field's focuses using other field's methodologies. My sole human-subject experiment so far was a psychology experiment (survey-based, simulated game) to explore a anthropology focus (altruistic punishment) and included a biological statistical methodology (multimodel inference using AIC's). The instructor got lost on what you could and couldn't do with multimodel inferences*** as well as my subject matter ("Too much jargon.").
A second exception occurs when I find myself fighting uphill battles to bring cross-discipline information into discussions where others have a single focus. My best illustration of this was a discussion group on chimpanzee and bonobos as study models for understanding human behavior. I found myself having to argue with others--primarily anthropology graduate students--whom I was actually in agreement with because they refused to consider a synergetic combination of inter-species effects and proximate, neural mechanistic effects for behavioral similarities and differences.
In most cases, I simply offer my two cents and deal with the fact people are invested in their own perspective... Which is one reason I'm writing a random blog here. What I wand to do--besides getting more into the habit of writing more--is to "think out loud" about things I hear and read and try to put them into context. (Hopefully in a way that won't keep me from getting a job or into graduate school.)
* - Yes, my university allows one to minor in both anthropology and sociocultural anthropology because the minors are taught in two separate colleges. I would have preferred to dual-major anthropology and psychology but I'm not too facile with other languages and the adoption of a bachelors of science in anthropology at my university arrived without one of the core courses required being installed in the course catalog as of yet.
** - I will admit my understanding of some of the statistical procedures isn't complete yet and some of the mathematical modeling is a little fuzzy...
*** - Multimodel inference is useful to explore the differences in effect for multiple independent variables. What it doesn't do is give you a fixed p-value and let you hypothesize test with it.
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