Welcome to their TED talk: interdisciplinary senior projects
Blythe Barrineau, Sports and Visual Arts Editor
Photo by Aatik Tasneem on Unsplash
For most seniors, a capstone project is just one last assignment before graduation. For students in the interdisciplinary studies program at North Greenville University, it means more.
“It’s complicated,” said Gregory Bruce, program coordinator. “On the surface, it’s two disciplines. By the time they’re seniors, it starts to look more like a calling.”
Instead of focusing on just one area of study, interdisciplinary students combine two, or sometimes three, fields and learn how to connect them – not just put them side by side.
“That’s the difference,” said Bruce. “We’re not just adding things together, we’re integrating them.”
This process isn’t easy. Over their time at NGU, students not only learn skills and information from their chosen disciplines, they are also learning how to connect them.
Students in the program take three different seminar classes during their sophomore, junior and senior years. They spend time thinking and preparing for these projects all three years but start refining and building their ideas as seniors.
The most unique part of their projects is how they are presented.
Rather than writing a traditional research paper and then presenting it, students write their papers as TED talk scripts so the presentation feels more like a conversation than a lecture.
“We want it to feel like they’re talking to you,” said Bruce. “It’s about connection.”
This idea of connection also shows up in the topics they choose. The wide range of concentrations in the interdisciplinary studies program allows students to choose almost anything they can think of.
For senior Sarah Dixon, she is drawing from her concentrations in Christian studies and communication to focus on a topic she thinks people don’t talk about enough, discipling young women through sexual struggles.
“I don’t think we talk about that,” Dixon said. “Every girl I’ve talked to has had the same reaction – like, ‘Yes, this needs to be talked about.’”
Dixon was inspired by her experience working with girls of all ages. She has been a summer camp counselor, worked with students in small groups and has been an SLT at NGU. Through these experiences, she noticed how many people actually struggle with this but also have a hard time talking and working through it.
Her project combines research and surveys to better understand the issues and what to do about it.
“I feel like I’m learning something I can actually use,” she said. “It’s not just a project. It’s something I can take with me.”
Dixon hopes to create a curriculum that can be used to help college RAs, camp counselors and small group leaders through these conversations.
Senior Jaycie Thigpen took a different route with her project, combining her interests in English, linguistics and theology.
Her project explores how poetry and theology can work together without misrepresenting who God is.
“Theology is really precise and poetry is really abstract,” Thigpen said. “There’s tension there.”
That tension is what pushed her to dig deeper. As someone who loves both writing poetry and studying theology, she realized how easy it was to unintentionally misrepresent something about God when using figurative or metaphorical language.
“I don’t want to strip God of His glory because I’m not careful with my language,” she said.
Her project is personal, reflecting not only her academic interests but also her faith and future goals.
“I’ve seen how my interests have developed into something that can glorify the Lord,” she said. “That’s what matters most to me.”
For Matthew Eaton, the focus is less on creative expression and more on something most people can overlook in everyday life: how we actually understand the words we use.
“I’ve noticed that ideas don’t always translate,” Eaton said. “Even when we’re using the same words.”
His project explores how people can walk away from the same conversation with completely different interpretations. Not necessarily because they disagree on the issue itself, but because they define key terms differently.
A lot of his inspiration came from C.S. Lewis, particularly discussions about how language and assumptions shape understanding in everyday conversations and in spiritual contexts.
“If there’s one thing I hope people take away, it’s to slow down and actually figure out what someone means,” he said.
Even though the topics are all over the place, they all come back to the same challenge, learning how to bring different disciplines together in a meaningful way.
All of this work will come together at the program’s annual TED Talk event on April 29, in Moore Hall at Hayes Ministry Center on campus.
