Graduate student perspectives on opportunities and approaches for supporting transdisciplinary research and education

Novel transdisciplinary programs have developed that train graduate students to combat traditional disciplinary siloes and emphasize collaborative, boundary-crossing approaches. Insights into how to improve such programs usually originate from the limited number of faculty who have either founded or taught in such programs. However, graduate students have long fostered the development of transdisciplinary approaches and continue to identify avenues for addressing the nuanced socio-ecological issues of today. The perspectives of graduate students engaged in transdisciplinary education can offer universities insights into how to promote ethical community engagement and integrate action-oriented thinking into program development. As students across the first four cohorts in a transdisciplinary graduate program (Penn State’s LandscapeU), we identify elements of research approaches that can enhance transdisciplinary graduate education based on our collective experiences and explore how our experiences relate to our graduate student peers in transdisciplinary programs within the extant literature. We synthesize this material to present 19 recommendations for improving transdisciplinary education that can be generalized across contexts. Graduate students, faculty, and administrators should consider implementing our recommendations to strengthen their existing programs, advocate for more effective community engagement, and integrate into proposals for future transdisciplinary graduate programs. Given the increasing complexity of socio-ecological problems, this work draws attention to the vast resources available from graduate student experiences and how these experiences can be used to advance transdisciplinary science.