Cross-Pollination

It starts casually: the exchange of information needed to get missions completed successfully and without casualties, the growled explanation a scientist gives of what they're doing so they'll be left alone long enough to save the city or their lives, specialties discussed over meals and on offworld trips, the training asked for when a scientist realizes they'd only just escaped death by Wraith or Genii or the native fauna. On Atlantis, both intelligence and physical prowess are important and prized, and interactions between the scientists and the soldiers are a must. They call it cross-pollination, on the too-infrequent occasions when there's enough time to take it slowly and show someone else what they're doing so that they can do it themselves if they have to. When McKay shoves a sheet of equations at Sheppard and tells him to solve them. When Cadman shows Katie Brown how to blow something up. When one of the marines uses what he's been learning from Dr. Keller to perform a tracheotomy. When everybody seems to know how to curse in every language anybody on Atlantis can speak. It's just another part of being so close to everybody that they feel like family.

Eventually it's institutionalized, because it's easier to tell the reinforcements that it's required to learn as much as they can outside of their specialties than to tell them "hey, you never know when you might need to identify if something's a plant or a fungus. Or solve a math problem that's probably at the graduate level because it'll save the scientists' valuable time. Or blow up a wall without taking the whole room on the other side out, and yes, we know you're a geologist. It's probably a good idea" and have them completely ignore you and because of that inadvertently cause the death of somebody, or more likely several somebodies. Classes remain on an informal level, because nobody has an even schedule where they can say they'll be somewhere at a certain time, unless that time is on the order of "five minutes from now". The veterans have seen enough Hail Marys that have worked because of cross-pollination that they don't question their need to tell an igneous rock from a sedimentary one, or to identify statues to any number of Pegasus's gods, or to fix all of the common types of Ancient technology.

The new arrivals try desperately to keep up with curriculum they'd never had any desire to learn and gradually take part in more of the conversations which touch on any number of things they never would have learned if they hadn't come to Atlantis.