Excellent article. I have worked for twenty years at another university in Tokyo and taught and supervised many non-Japanese graduate students, but I still learned things from the author's perspective.
One small pushback: The author writes, "the Japanese PhD system pushes you to graduate in three years." This applies in some programs and some fields, but is by no means universal. In the graduate program where I used to teach (I am now emeritus and no longer supervising students), the steps leading up to the Ph.D. and the expectations for the thesis made it practically impossible for students to finish in three years, especially if they continued to work part-time. This created particular challenges for foreign students on MEXT scholarships who had to work out other ways to support themselves and renew their visas while they continued to write their theses.
Thank you! And, re: 3 years, that's good to know, I should have been a bit more precise.
What field were you supervising?
3 years in CS is, imo, a little tight but not bad. But I always wondered how people in other fields (stem and otherwise) did it. CS simply doesn't have to deal with the extraneous factors that come with, e.g., biology or climatology.
I was affiliated with a graduate department in language and information sciences, and the fields of the faculty and students ranged from literature, history, and philosophy to theoretical linguistics and natural language processing. I don’t recall any students doing hardcore CS, but it wouldn’t have been inconceivable, especially if there was an NLP connection. But the academic culture of the department leaned more toward the humanities and social sciences than to science and engineering.
One of the factors making the finish-in-three-years target very difficult to meet is that the thesis committees would include faculty from different fields and backgrounds, often with differing expectations for what a Ph.D. thesis should include. It was not unusual for a committee to ask a student to make a variety of substantial changes and additions to a thesis draft before submitting. That revision process could take six months or longer; because of the schedule for graduate coursework and defenses, that alone would push the student beyond the three-year target.
Add in all of the other stumbling blocks that might come up in graduate school—family issues, financial problems, an advisor who retires or gets ill, etc.—and three years was no longer a realistic goal in that department.
tkgally · · focus · HN ↗
One small pushback: The author writes, "the Japanese PhD system pushes you to graduate in three years." This applies in some programs and some fields, but is by no means universal. In the graduate program where I used to teach (I am now emeritus and no longer supervising students), the steps leading up to the Ph.D. and the expectations for the thesis made it practically impossible for students to finish in three years, especially if they continued to work part-time. This created particular challenges for foreign students on MEXT scholarships who had to work out other ways to support themselves and renew their visas while they continued to write their theses.
mcyc · · focus · HN ↗
What field were you supervising?
3 years in CS is, imo, a little tight but not bad. But I always wondered how people in other fields (stem and otherwise) did it. CS simply doesn't have to deal with the extraneous factors that come with, e.g., biology or climatology.
tkgally · · focus · HN ↗
One of the factors making the finish-in-three-years target very difficult to meet is that the thesis committees would include faculty from different fields and backgrounds, often with differing expectations for what a Ph.D. thesis should include. It was not unusual for a committee to ask a student to make a variety of substantial changes and additions to a thesis draft before submitting. That revision process could take six months or longer; because of the schedule for graduate coursework and defenses, that alone would push the student beyond the three-year target.
Add in all of the other stumbling blocks that might come up in graduate school—family issues, financial problems, an advisor who retires or gets ill, etc.—and three years was no longer a realistic goal in that department.