Interdisciplinary

An image depicting work at the School of Art + Design.
Borders are meant to be crossed. At the School of Art + Design, we expect all of our students to explore forms of art and learning that lie outside of their specific field of expertise. This cross-disciplinary approach poises you to challenge tradition and shape the future.

Our undergraduate and graduate curricula are carefully designed to ensure you get plenty of exposure to the spectrum of opportunities within the School of Art + Design. On any given day, you’ll find studio artists working in design courses. Designers collaborating with writers. Painters making movies.

You’ll also discover the benefits of our close relationship with our six academic partners in the College of Fine and Applied Arts:

We encourage you to enroll in courses offered through these units and to engage in independent collaborations with the artists who study and teach in them. In addition, our departments often team up to bring visitors to campus, to host colloquia, and to sponsor multidisciplinary projects—to contribute another dimension to your educational experience.

Every corner of campus is open to you. You can choose electives from among the university’s 150 majors, twelve colleges, the Institute of Aviation, the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, the School of Social Work, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Freshmen alone have upwards of 4,000 courses to select from. This means that you may be taking Introduction to Electromagnetic Fields or Readings in Sanskrit at the same time that you’re wrestling with that huge project for your graphic design lab. We wouldn’t have it any other way.