Students come to an iSchool program with a passion for exciting and novel research which they perceive as being rare in traditional disciplinary areas. However, the range of freedom allowed in conducting research at iSchools sometimes poses unexpected difficulties for students. This study aims to identify the unique problems that graduate students in an interdisciplinary iSchool program encounter when designing a research project. A qualitative content analysis method is used to analyze students’ responses regarding the difficulties they have experienced. The findings indicate that the difficulties, which range from a paradox of choice in determining a research topic to communicating the implications of their research outcomes, generally point to a problem of identity formation. This study argues that students’ identity problems have been overshadowed by the hype of interdisciplinary studies and that helping students establish a solid identity within iSchool programs is necessary to produce healthy and confident researchers.ye
