Well, a year has passed since my last time writing in this blog, what an achievement!! After contemplating for a long time, finally my mood to write comes again, started by doing a bit overhaul with my blog design and layout. After using the so-called Dynamic Views for quite a time, though I indeed love the simplicity and flow, I realized that there are some functions missing from this views which should have been not! Reading the blogger help here and there I found the sentence that said "... unless you're using Dynamic Views", means that there are some features not working (yet, maybe) in this new layout. So I decided to choose functionality over design and turn into the most basic and simple layout, which is beautiful enough, for me at least.
Okay, enough with the blogger matters. In this post, I want to talk about my school, called The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (総合研究大学院大学, Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), or Sokendai in short. The name itself is enough to make one confused, combined that with the strange education system it has adopted make this university is really unique in Japan. If you ask most Japanese, 99.99% of them must know about University of Tokyo, Kyoto, or big private university like Waseda. But for Sokendai, I'm sure most Japanese never even heard the name. Aside from the unique system which I will explain later, the university itself only took in graduate students, meaning there are no undergraduate degree offered in here. They also only accepted 3-years doctoral course or 5-years doctoral course program, so either way if you enter Sokendai and have a smooth journey here (hopefully that's the case with me), you will end up with a doctoral degree.
The most distinguished features, I think, is the concept of IURI or Inter-University Research Institute. Every department in Sokendai, has its own respective research insitute affiliated with it, and usually it's a big or national institute in the frontier of research and development in Japan. For example, Department of Informatics with National Institute of Informatics, or Department of Genetics with National Institute of Genetics. As for me, I entered Department of Space and Astronautical Science which is affiliated with ISAS/JAXA. So even though the headquarter of the university is in Hayama, I only go there for opening ceremony. After that, each of us go to our respective research institute and the whole processes of learning and coursework is going in that institute. That's why right now I live in Sagamihara, near Fuchinobe Station to be more accurate, because it is the home of ISAS/JAXA.
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| I don't know how to read that until now... |
I entered this university with Prof. Morita as my supervisor, which is outrageously popular recently in Japan because of Epsilon. Fortunately, among his numerous TV interviews, he still find some times to meet me and teach me many things, and I'm very grateful of that. Though I'm a very bad student..... ._.
And in this institute, I joined the Inatani Lab which actually consists of many students not only under Prof. Inatani, but also from many including me and some other students. The thing is, I am the only foreign student in this lab and all other members are Japanese! Makes it quite hard to communicate casually because of my very poor Japanese, though they can also speak English with me. They also come from various university. Most of them come from University of Tokyo, while there are members from Tokai or TUAT too.
So far, my journey in this around 3 months has been fun. The members are all very helpful, though sometimes it can be very lonely with no fellow Indonesian students in here. The only problem is I've been quite struggling with all the materials, coursework, and research. Though that is certainly bound to happen and it's normal I think for graduate students. Hahaha...
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| Too bad I didn't have the chance to take a picture when it's fall, maybe next year.. |
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