With scarce resources and a steadily declining birthrate, if Japan is to continue its development in future years as a world leader in science and technology, human resource cultivation is one of the country’s most vital challenges. With that, the role that graduate education plays in human resource cultivation is becoming more and more important.

Graduate education provided by most universities in Japan is focused on education to deepen expertise through research. As such, the results students achieve as part of a doctoral course are typically confined to a specific field, and these accomplishments are quite different from social needs.

In the current competitive global society, on the other hand, graduate students require a comprehensive range of abilities if they are to lead society into the future—the ability to apply their knowledge to other fields, identify and solve problems, make plans, communicate with others, identify the true nature of things, and make decisions based on their insight—as well as the ability to acquire basic academic skills in their own field and pursue their research.

Conventional university education has not adequately responded to these needs. Industry collaboration programs therefore aim to foster human resources who can play an active role in a global society by improving their abilities through internship programs and special lectures for creative human resource cultivation.

Internship