Report on Fourth Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools

2016/07/10

The Fourth Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools was held in the International Conference Hall of Makuhari Messe from Friday, July 8 through Sunday, July 10, 2016. This year’s Student Meeting was organized by the Program for Leading Graduate School at Chiba University: Nurture of Creative Research Leaders in Immune System Regulation and Innovative Therapeutics together with the University of Tsukuba’s Ph.D. Program in Human Biology (HBP) and the Ph.D. Program in Empowerment Informatics (EMP). Sixteen EMP students took part in managing the Meeting, which proved quite successful from start to finish.

Some of the EMP students involved in managing the Meeting

I have taken part in these Student Meetings every year since joining the Program. The previous two meetings in which I took part, in Kumamoto in June 2014 (organizers: Kumamoto University, Kyushu University, and Nagasaki University; host city: Kumamoto) and in Hokkaido in June 2015 (organizers: Hokkaido University’s “Fostering Global Leader in Veterinary Science for Contributing to One Health” program and the Ambitious Leader’s Program “Fostering Future Leaders to Open New Frontiers in Material Science”; host city: Sapporo), proved excellent opportunities for both maintaining motivation and becoming painfully aware of the abilities I myself lack, through interacting with numerous other students. In this 2016 meeting, I took part not as a participant but as a core member of the organizing committee and representative of the University of Tsukuba’s EMP program. We met eight times with representatives of the co-organizers Chiba University and the University of Tsukuba’s HBP program, in preparatory meetings to address the ultimately unanswerable question of how best to create a venue for exchange among students. Following these and other efforts, the Meeting was held July 8-10, 2016.

This year’s Meeting was the first to be held in the Kanto region. It was carried out based on the concept of a “festival” in which participants could get a way from their everyday research and other activities to take part in exchange with other students. We planned this event as a conference by and for students, with the considerable support or people from industry, the academy, and government.

During the Meeting, we invited leaders and innovators—people in roles that we ourselves are aiming for through our programs—to deliver valuable lectures on subjects that one rarely gets to hear about in everyday activities, such as the aims of their activities and things that they take into consideration. It is hoped that the Meeting served as an excellent opportunity for participating students to consider the meaning of these inputs by using them to create outputs through workshops held during the Meeting.

The workshops’ outputs were infinite in variety, and it seemed that participants were able to form ties among themselves as students in leading programs as they engaged in free and open-minded discussions.

Personally, it seems to me that my greatest experiences from taking part in management of this Meeting were the chances to improve my management skills and grow as a person, as we overcame the very large number of difficult challenges we faced through richness of imagination, in the same way as in our everyday research activities. It was a valuable experience in management and addressing issues that can only arise when a large number of people is involved, something that cannot be experienced through ordinary research alone.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all of the very large number of people who cooperated in holding this Meeting.

Related URL

The website of the Fourth Student Meeting of Leading Graduate Schools
https://sites.google.com/site/the4thstudentmeeting/home

Press Release

PR TIMES
http://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000097.000015177.html