A transdisciplinary PhD in this school is not a training in methods; it is an invitation to a long journey into the unknown. It begins with a simple, almost brutal act: facing the world as it is. The student stands before reality like a traveller before an unexplored landscape, with only a mirror in hand. That mirror reflects familiar institutions, accepted concepts, and settled routines, but it also hints at distortions and blind spots. The first courage required is to keep looking, to resist the urge to look away or to accept the reflection as final.
Soon, it becomes clear that this journey cannot be made alone. The traveller enters a community with its habits, stories, and rituals. There is a language spoken here that was not learned in childhood. It is dense with citations, subtle hierarchies, and coded expectations. At first, this academic habitus feels like foreign ground: the same words carry different weights, silence may mean consent or rejection, and a raised eyebrow can do more than a written review. To move forward, the student must learn to listen carefully and to read the room as closely as any text. The unknown here is not only nature, but also the culture of those who claim to know it.
As the journey continues, the territory itself begins to shift. What once seemed like a clear research problem dissolves into overlapping questions. Evidence appears in strange places: in metadata, in side remarks at conferences, in the tacit practices of laboratories and offices. The student discovers that much of scientific life is held together by things that are never fully articulated. This is the first deep encounter with the unknown: not as a distant frontier, but as something woven into everyday work. Learning to navigate this tacit dimension is like learning to walk in the dark, guided by small patterns, half‑formed intuitions, and the feel of the ground underfoot.
At some point, the mirror is no longer enough. The journey turns from observation to creation. The student realises that every theory, every model, is a crafted path through reality, not a neutral map. To go further, a new path must be cut. This is the most exposed part of the journey, because it requires saying: the world could be seen otherwise. It is here that transdisciplinarity becomes more than a slogan. Methods, concepts, and metaphors from different fields are brought together, not as a collection, but as a single, evolving vehicle. The unknown is no longer just out there; it is also in the form of the work itself, which does not fit neatly into any established box.
Such a journey inevitably crosses borders guarded by institutions: journals, review panels, disciplinary committees. These are like checkpoints at the edge of familiar territories. They ask for passports in the form of citations, formats, and expected arguments. The traveller must learn to negotiate passage without surrendering the originality of the route. This calls for a particular kind of maturity: to understand the rules well enough to bend them intelligently, and to respect the community without becoming its prisoner. The unknown here is whether a new way of seeing can be made legible to those trained to see otherwise.
In the later stages, the journey turns reflective. The student looks back and realises that the problem with which they started is no longer the same. The world has not changed, but its contours have. Concepts have been sharpened or broken, randomness has gained structure, and boundaries between disciplines have blurred. The traveller is now both observer and maker of reality: the new model they have built does not simply describe an unknown land, it helps bring that land into shared existence. The PhD dissertation is the written trace of this crossing, a narrative that allows others to follow, question, and extend the path.
The school, in this sense, does not promise safe arrival. Its promise is different: that by the end of the journey, the student will be at home in the unknown. The mirror they first held up to reality will have been turned many times—toward the world, toward the scientific community, and toward themselves. What remains is not certainty, but a practised capacity to travel: to move between disciplines, to live with ambiguity, to imagine and construct new realities without losing touch with the one that first appeared in the glass.
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