For many, the path to a doctorate is a daunting one. You might be looking into a phd in psychology or perhaps a phd in english literature, but you feel a bit restricted by the traditional silos of those departments. A liberal arts research path is different because it’s "interdisciplinary." That’s a fancy word for "connecting the dots." It allows a scholar to look at, say, how social media affects mental health by using tools from both sociology and psychology. It’s about freedom, really—the freedom to follow a question wherever it leads.