From SPSS to Soldering Irons: My Journey into Multidisciplinary Research
When I started in psychological research, my world was straightforward: run a simple experiment, collect some data, and plug it into SPSS for a neat ANOVA. Bob’s your uncle, research done. The idea that I’d one day be discussing signal detection models, let alone wielding a soldering iron, was completely off my radar.
But my PhD threw me into the deep end. The project began as an unlikely trio: two psychologists and a performance artist. Soon, our lab meetings felt less like a psychology working group and more like a United Nations of disciplines. An engineer joined to build our hardware, a computer scientist became my co-supervisor, and a data scientist co-authored our first paper. My most important new tool wasn’t a software package, but the patient technician who taught me how to connect a cable without setting off the fire alarm.
This collision of worlds was profoundly challenging. It meant learning to translate ‘statistical power’ into a language an artist could appreciate, and ‘aesthetic integrity’ into a concept an engineer could work with. I quickly realised that the most innovative solutions didn’t come from any single field, but from the productive friction generated between them.
My biggest takeaway was that true multidisciplinary research isn’t just about borrowing tools. It’s a fundamental shift in perspective. It’s recognising the limits of your own toolkit and having the humility to see a problem through someone else’s eyes. I learned that the messy, often confusing, process of collaboration isn’t a bug in the system—it’s the feature that drives discovery.