The DSI Excellence Program: interdisciplinarity as part of the PhD
The DSI Excellence Program equips doctoral candidates from every discipline to think beyond the boundaries of their own field. The sixth impact of our anniversary series; graduates describe in the video what the programme gave them.
Interdisciplinarity is hard to convey in a lecture. It has to be experienced. That is why the DSI Excellence Program adds two years to doctoral studies at the University of Zurich, during which physicians, lawyers, computer scientists and humanities scholars work with each other continuously. It opens with a three-day BootCamp, before the first lecture of the autumn semester, where participants examine each other's research plans from a data protection and ethics perspective. In the Interdisciplinary Reading Seminar that follows, they present papers from their own field and see how other disciplines read particular aspects of them. The modules are taught by instructors from different faculties.
What this approach yields becomes clear above all after graduation. Six former participants report in the video: they now research AI and ethics at Oxford, for instance, or public trust in health data sharing in Augsburg, work as a Senior UX Researcher at Raiffeisen Switzerland, or have co-founded an EdTech startup. And the cohorts outlast the programme: many keep meeting well beyond the university.
To the impact: DSI Excellence Program
The DSI Excellence Program is the sixth of ten impacts in the DSI's anniversary series «Decade of Impact». Every week in the run-up to the anniversary celebration on November 24, a new impact will be published here and on the DSI's LinkedIn channel. Learn more about the other impacts and their publication dates: Link