A master’s is neither a well-earned bachelor’s degree in three or more years of being a procrastinating party animal, nor is it a PhD attempting to light a candle with a bazooka.

A master’s is the Goldilocks degree… not too hot and not too cold.

Just as the Earth is ideally positioned in the Goldilocks zone of our Sun’s warmth, a master’s degree is just the right temperature for sustaining life.

In other words… you can actually do something with a master’s degree and I wanted its life sustaining porridge in my belly.

But I didn’t want to specialise in only one specific area. That’s not who I am and that’s not what the world needs.

I wanted to do something more purposeful… and that master’s degree didn’t exist, so I got to brewing my own bowl of porridge.

Mistakenly used interchangeably with interdisciplinary – to employ the knowledge and methods of two or more disciplines – transdisciplinary is best explained by thinking outside of the box of oats from which we are now going to make two bowls of porridge.

One bowl is blueberry porridge and the other is banana porridge, two distinct bowls with two different flavours.

Now, what can be done with them?

An interdisciplinarian might taste a few spoonfuls of each, but, by the interdisciplinarian’s nature, the two bowls would soon be combined together into one bowl of blueberry and banana porridge. A new bowl of porridge made up of elements of the original two bowls would then exist… but, at the end of this process, you still have a bowl of porridge, which the interdisciplinarian will most likely gobble up.

A transdisciplinarian, on the other hand, would take the bowl of blueberry porridge and combine it with the bowl of banana porridge, not solely because he wanted a bigger amount of porridge, but because he is curious to see if dried porridge is strong enough to use as an adhesive to hold together a makeshift cabinet he is constructing, a cabinet he very much wants to smell like bananas and blueberries.

Now those bowls of porridge have been transformed into something else entirely…