I’ve written about applying to the University of Tokyo in a previous post. The submission period for that “Foreign Research Student” program at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies was back in October, and I had my application FedEx’ed over in mid-October. The University of Tokyo didn’t send me any acknowledgment notice of having received my application, all I know is from my FedEx tracking number, someone had signed for my package. I knew that they would release the results in December, but it’s now December 29th and I still haven’t received any news yet. :( A couple of weeks back, I went back to look at the info page for the “Foreign Research Student” program, to my horror, the English page has been taken off their website!! The Japanese version is still there, and from it I verified that the results will be sent out in late December. I know the English version was a little out of date, but why had they taken it offline completely rather than updating it? Are they not welcoming “foreigners” in their “Foreign Research Students” program? (Why call it “Foreign Research Students” then??) This week though, I missed a delivery from the Post Office. They left me a slip in the mailbox, I’m not sure what it is but this may be a certified letter from the University of Tokyo… Oh God, I’m so nervous. I’ve done my best in gathering all the requirements and written a pretty damn good research proposal (as seen here in Japanese). I keep telling myself to prepare for the worst, but I know that if I get a rejection letter, I’m still going to be devastated! Meanwhile, it’s more waiting until I go to the Post Office to pick up the mysterious letter / parcel on Monday. If there is a God, I need your blessing now!
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ニュースメディアに関するクラウドソーシング
Here’s my research proposal for the Graduate School Application for International Research Students at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. It’s translated into Japanese by my friend Satoko. After spending more than 3 months writing and revising my proposal in English, I had to look for a translator to put it into Japanese. Since I was in Hong Kong at the time, I thought I’d find a local translator to help me. Unfortunately, the only thing I could find was a company that doesn’t have anyone who has a good command of English. I spent HKD $1300 but after receiving the end product, I had to schedule a meeting with the owner of the company and sat down with her for an entire afternoon to redo the whole thing. Still, that wasn’t good enough and my friend Satoko took time out of her busy school schedule to help me polish the paper to this final version. So, here it is!
Read MoreSold our house in Seattle, bought a new condo in New York
I’ve meant to come back and post about all the things that I’ve been doing, but I’m not too good with multi-tasking… Whenever I’m too concentrated on one thing, I don’t want to spread myself out to do other things. Anyway, after my last post and my last day at Yahoo!, I flew back to Seattle and stayed for a couple of months. Our family house was still there with no one living in it, so my mom and I went back to pack everything up and put it on the market. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to move from a home of more than 15 years, but I can tell you it’s no fun at all! How I wished DragonBall’s Capsule Corp. was real… LOL. While I was in Seattle, I continued to communicate with my friends at cuusoo.com and refine my research plan. (I’ll post it on here later.) I also emailed the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo to clarify about the research plan and the “Supervising Faculty of Choice”. You have to fill out that field on your research plan, but it seems that you don’t have to contact the professor beforehand. I sent 3 emails to 3 different faculty members, only the 1st one returned my email, the rests simply ignored me. (I sent the email in Japanese too! I’ll also post that here later.) Another requirement was the “Japanese Language Proficiency Level” form, which I needed to find a teacher to administer some sort of test to me. This turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought! No one at the University of Washington’s Japanese department could do that for me. In the end, I went back and contacted Yamada Keiko in New York, whom I had gotten a last minute crash course from back then for the interview of the position at Yahoo Japan. She gave me the sample JLPT Level 2 test, which was pretty tough!
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