As college students, it is our duty to pursue depth in multiple areas for the sake of sparking the innovative ideas that will drive our future.

The Renaissance man is heralded in our history books. From a young age we learn about the tremendous achievements of people like Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, whose multidisciplinary capabilities were quintessential in creating our modern society.

However, in a world that encourages specialization, it is easy to lose the “Renaissance” perspective. As college students, it is our duty to pursue depth in multiple areas for the sake of sparking the innovative ideas that will drive our future.

I once had it explained to me as follows: Imagine a long horizontal line representing every category of knowledge that there is (e.g. physics, art history, music). Then draw down from each of those categories a vertical line that represents your depth of knowledge in that subject.

As students who are pursuing specific degrees, our diagrams are all becoming T-shaped as we gain substantial depth in a single discipline. The idea behind being a Renaissance thinker is that you can gain depth in a variety of areas in addition to your area of focus. This changes the diagram from a T-shape to a more complex shape, and it is from those multiple strands of knowledge that new ideas are formed.

Countless products owe their origins to the combination of seemingly unrelated ideas. For instance, modern chewing gum was invented by an accountant at a rubber company who experimented with gum recipes in his free time. Cornflakes were the result of the joint effort between entrepreneur Will Keith Kellogg and his brother, an M.D., who together were able to create a nutritious cereal that was also enjoyable to eat. Post-it notes were made possible when a 3M employee, frustrated with his hymnal bookmarks always falling out at church, thought to apply a colleague’s new adhesive substance to create a bookmark that would stay in place. The list goes on and on.

This is why having multidisciplinary expertise is critical to the future success of our society. Companies realize this, and thus employers seek to hire candidates who demonstrate skills outside of their specific job function.

According to the “Twenty-First Century Workplace Trends Study” by Joseph Boyett and David Snyder, “We are seeing rapid growth in the use of cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams with globally and ethnically diverse memberships. Already, one-third of American companies with fifty or more employees have half or more of their employees working in self-managed or problem-solving teams.”

This requires prospective employees to not just be experts in their fields, but also to carry on the roles of managing and collaborating with others. To better communicate with people from other fields, it helps to have some knowledge about where those people are coming from.

There is no better time than college to build this Renaissance perspective. English majors should wrestle with math problems, pre-med students should dabble in finance, and engineers should ponder the works of Shakespeare. We should make an effort to explore additional areas of study even if they are not required by our own colleges.

In addition, finding something you are passionate about — be it a Registered Student Organization or just a hobby, regardless of your major — is important because it gives you a unique outlook on the world that may separate you from everybody else.

Along with finding your place in the job market, exploring a variety of disciplines leaves the possibility for you to take your life in a new direction that you may never have thought about before. Ronald Reagan, for instance, started out his career as an actor appearing in more than 50 films before turning to politics.

Humans are inherently complex creatures, and to think that you can define yourself solely by a major listed in the University’s course catalog is foolish.

Instead of focusing on solidifying a specific career path, we should strive to pursue all of our passions, and let the culmination of everything work itself out later. This is essential to attaining substantial growth as a society and as individuals.

Andrew is a sophomore in Engineering.

He can be reached at [email protected].