Interdepartmental and inter-faculty groupings are usually able to guide students in setting up disciplinary programs. Where no established degree program exists, a student may request admission into a special individual interdisciplinary program administered by a supervisory committee representing the various disciplines involved. In the program as it now exists, the prospective student has to bring together three or four qualified faculty from different departments or units. Because there are no constraints on which fields are brought together, there are virtually no two students in the same subfield. Research topics in this program have included, for example: Nisga'a Architecture and Landscapes: Ecological Wisdom and Community-led Design (involving the Schools/Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Forest Ecology, Environmental Studies, Ethnobotany, and Nisga'a House of Wisdom Matters of Life and Death in the Neonatal Intensive Care Nursery: Decision Making for the Not Yet Competent (involving the Departments of Pediatrics, Comparative Religion, Medical Anthropology, and Bioethics) Red Rhetorics: Politics, Polemics and the Marx-Machine (involving the Departments of English, Germanic Studies, and Philosophy) Multicultural Practices of Canadian Immigrant Youth: 'A Work in Progress' (involving the Departments of Educational Studies, English, and Anthropology) Interdisciplinary Studies, in collaboration with the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, offers a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction.

Students have access to a variety of facilities. ISGP relies on a home department in which a student's research supervisor holds her/his major appointment to provide intellectual and practical help and a sense of student community. Students will have access to their home departments facilities as well as all UBC facilities such as libraries.