My Introduction to BIS

Great news! As of Friday, my degree was officially approved by the Director of the BIS program, and in two weeks it will be registered as an official degree of GMU. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. It occurs to me that I have not fully defined the BIS degree program beyond labeling it as an "opportunity." Let me clear that up by offering a less abstract definition and explain it according to the way I am experiencing it.

BIS is a Bachelor’s of Individualized Study. The first stage in the process of the program is taking the BIS 300 introductory course. (There is a sequence of four required BIS courses.) This is the idea of exploring theoretical and practical approaches of combining individualized disciplines in order to design a specialized concentration. In other words, our goal is to combine at least two disciplines in order to study in the field of something that is not offered at Mason.

The first day of class there was an emphasis on the course schedule, to include readings, papers, and something nicknamed the “Salmon Sheet.” The blank faces of my classmates reassured me that I wasn’t the only one who wondered what the hell I had signed up for.

There were readings and class discussions about practical intelligence, developing writers, reflective practices, non-traditional higher education, and, of course, interdisciplinary studies. There were argumentative, reflective, and response papers assigned, designed to foster our minds toward thinking and defining our interdisciplinary concentration – whatever that meant.

There were many conversations amongst classmates concerning our shared confusion, frustration, and uncertainty about what was expected of us. Most everyone had an idea of the disciplines they wanted to combine, but we were told that we had to have a “question.” The infamous question swamped our minds. Through many conversations with each other, we concluded that it meant our specialized concentration had to be based on an ambiguous, phenomenon-like problem that can only be answered from an interdisciplinary point-of-view.

The closest we ever came to confirming that this was the intention of the degree, was towards the end of the BIS 300 course. One of our assignments was to design a Venn diagram, which are three overlapping circles containing different information, yet share some values. None of the interdisciplinary-based readings or assignments opened my eyes like the Venn assignment. This was the "a-ha" moment for me and the majority of my classmates. Now we're getting somewhere, but we had less than 4 weeks to get there.

Though we all felt more comfortable after the Venn diagram, our final presentations were still a bit shaky. All in all, the BIS 300 course was a rocky start to understanding the path we chose and what was expected of us. It left a bad taste in my mouth, but I pushed on. The money and time were already spent.