This appeared in Zack Lynch's blog this morning:

Renewable energy systems will be a major focus at the university along
with a heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary research. As a graduate of
UCLA who developed my own interdisciplinary education across three
schools (evolutionary biology, environmental science and then a
graduate degree in economic geography), I hope that UC Merced will
continue to devote resources to help students cross traditional
boundaries.

It looks like they are starting out with a good foundation. As Jessica
Green, assistant professor in the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences
put it,"...it's cool, I sit next to a philosophy professor, a Chinese
historian, a mathematician, a physicist and a poet." If that's not
interdisciplinary, then I don't know what is.

That's how to learn: getting out of one's comfort zone.

Come to think of it, interaction with people who are not like us take us into their comfort zones and out of ours. We learn where we don't overlap.