Study On Disciplinary Culture Adaptation Of Interdisciplinary Graduate Students

The number of interdisciplinary graduate students is increasing, especially in the humanities and social sciences. However, due to the boundary function of disciplines, at the beginning of study in a new subject, interdisciplinary graduate students will face such problems as bad-matching of the knowledge structure, deficiency of solid mastery of basal knowledge, bad adaptation in academic study caused by disciplinary differences, and so on. Therefore, in the three years of graduate study, what disciplinary differences interdisciplinary graduate students will experience? How will the differences impact them? What will influence their interdisciplinary adaptation? How will they adapt the new disciplinary culture? Based on in-depth interview with several interdisciplinary graduate students, by presentation of examples in real-life, analysis of these problems mentioned above was carried out. Furthermore, construction of training system adapt to interdisciplinary graduate students was discussed.It was discovered that disciplinary culture differences they experienced included differences in disciplinary knowledge systems, the methods of thinking and expression, the convention of teaching and research, the academic standards of evaluation. These differences originated from qualities and characteristics of disciplinary knowledge system itself. The main factors influenced adaptation can be sorted into interior factors including personalities, one's preparation for graduated study, one's inclination for his or her professional life, and one's inter-personal communication, and exterior ones as interdisciplinary distance and social support. Because of the differences in disciplinary culture and individual factors, there were differences in the process of adaptation to disciplinary culture also. Some of them experienced culture shock at the beginning, others entered into culture communication directly; some of them adapted the new disciplinary culture by individual efforts, and some of them experienced bad adaptation resulting from kinds of reasons.Based on the discoveries, the construction of training system suitable for interdisciplinary graduate students was discussed for consummation of training program and improvement of quality of graduate education.