Report on attendance at the second Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools
The Second Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools was held at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kumamoto University June 21-22, 2014. Five EMP first-year students took part in this meeting: Satoki Ogiso, Kosuke Sato, Hikaru Takatori, Tadayuki Tone, and Jun Nishida.
I attended the Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools at Kumamoto University. About 100 people attended the meeting, which as its name implies was a gathering of students from universities selected for the Leading Graduate Schools program. The meeting featured discussions on the vision of a leader and career paths after graduation, and I was able to gain knowledge on the differences between the vision of a leader that society demands and the one envisioned by students and on employment rates of Ph.D. program alumni and skills in demand. In addition to taking part in the meeting I also was able to hear what leaders spurring innovation had to say and learned knowledge that will be important to becoming a global leader. I still have work to do to become a researcher and a global leader, and I still have not fully developed my deals and vision, but I feel that through this meeting I was able to sow the seeds for growing these in the future. Aside from the meeting itself, being able to participate in a conference of students from across the country was a meaningful opportunity to interact with students from other universities, since such interaction is difficult at the University of Tsukuba due to its location.
This was my experience with a first large-scale event since entering the Ph.D. Program in Empowerment Informatics. The main topic was what we can do now to contribute to society as future Ph.Ds. Through exchange of opinions with numerous people from business and government in addition to students from other leading graduate schools in teams of just under 10 students each, we reached the conclusion that we need opportunities to learn such things as Ph.D. students. Thinking about the specific details from schedule and venue through funding, we combined together the things that we should be able to implement ourselves right away as a Ph.D. Student Draft Conference in which we ourselves would be the exhibits. We also strived to communicate the attractions of our own proposal, aiming to make it an enjoyable proposal for those hearing it since we were just one of many groups making proposals. In response, we were able to receive considerable feedback from representatives of industry and government and to hear many valuable discussions. Even though I had just entered the program, these were a stimulating two days in which I was able to get an idea of what I should do in the future.
This Student Meeting was a meeting organized and managed by students themselves in order to facilitate interaction among students from leading Ph.D. programs across Japan. The organizing committee was set up by an interuniversity team from Leading Graduate School program members in Kyushu: Kyushu University, Kumamoto University, and Nagasaki University. The main topic of the meeting was employability of Ph.Ds and contact between Ph.D. education and society, with the sub-topic being innovation from Kyushu. The intention was to stimulate exchange among students in the graduate programs, through discussions from a variety of points of view.
As a final summary, this meeting featured group presentations by students on the subject of “how students themselves need to study and how universities and companies need to support their studies, so that they can become Ph.D. candidates who will contribute to society. Each team’s presentation showed a variety of presentation efforts, such as keeping the audience interested by asking questions and appealing to the visual sense through images.
Participants voted on these presentations, and the team ‘JOIN US’, to which Mr. Ogiso belonged, one first place for its realistic, persuasive proposal and original presentation method, the ‘EE-NJANAI’ team to which Mr. Nishida belonged took second place for its unique idea of likening students to products and companies to consumers, and Mr. Tone’s ‘IDEA’ team won third place for its practical proposed solution and the way it likened the gap between the current state of Ph.D. education and corporate needs to a molecular structure.
