Inviting You to the Graduate School of Social Sciences
TAGA, Hidetoshi
Fostering Researchers and Practitioners: Interaction between Theory and Practice
The number of students enrolling in graduate school programs across Japan has been edging up each year. As student bodies grow, the traditional social sciences graduate school model, which focused on training students to be researchers, is being augmented with professional graduate schools set up with direct connections to real-world businesses. In addition, graduate programs principally designed to help students obtain national certification/accreditation have also been established, as well. These developments have brought a remarkable degree of diversification to social sciences graduate school programs over the past few years.
Graduate School of Social Sciences has assembled a research faculty in diverse fields. Our outstanding team is dedicated to achieving the school’s goal of training researchers with a new interdisciplinary perspective, as well as practitioners with a high level of expertise. We are fully aware that this vision is easy to articulate and that it takes a great deal of focus and discipline to put into practice.
Despite its relatively short history of just more than a decade, the Graduate School of Social Sciences has quickly made major achievements thanks to the concerted and sustained efforts of our faculty and graduate students. Having completed their graduate work and acquired a spectrum of specialized knowledge that is extensive in both breadth and depth, our graduate students carry their doctoral and master’s degrees out into the broader world, where they are working to make a real impact. Turning out highly educated researcher/practitioners is one of the most important missions of our school, and we understand that the need for graduates with both sets of skills will only increase further in the future. Our focus on interaction between theory and practice is an approach designed to help our student body go on to produce an even more diverse body of work.
To nurture the full potential with this advantage, our program’s doors are open to members of society who are already part of the workforce. The fact is that when the students who join the graduate school straight from their undergraduate studies and other students who come with a wealth of real-world job experience interact in research programs, exercises, and classroom discussions, both groups are exposed to ideas and concepts they may not have encountered in the past. This type of forum is an extremely valuable part of a student’s education, and we are constantly looking for new ways to encourage this type of interaction in our program.
The Graduate School of Social Sciences has actively recruited students from outside Japan since the 2007 academic year. The inclusion of non-Japanese students enables both students from Japan and students from overseas to broaden their perspectives, and leads to many truly innovative developments in both research and practical applications. Additionally, many members of our research faculty have developed personal networks that include researchers outside Japan, and we expect our program to become a great deal more international, on the whole, in the future.
Toward this end, we invite as many regular graduate students, working people, and non-Japanese students as possible to come study at our Graduate School of Social Studies. We especially welcome students that are coming in from the workforce and are pursuing continuing education. To accommodate this type of students and make it possible for them to study with us while working at the same time, we offer classes during evening hours to suit their schedules.
Social Sciences as a Comprehensive and Interdisciplinary Program
In order to develop the social sciences program that is comprehensive and interdisciplinary, our Graduate School has assembled a truly diverse research faculty that is enthusiastically committed to research, education and guidance. Having specialized in graduate school in what has classically been called the social, cultural and natural sciences, or alternatively labeled the sciences and humanities, our faculty members now provide research guidance to our students. Working day and night, our mission is to put our basic philosophy of a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social science program into practice in the classroom.
We must mobilize expertise in all fields if we are to properly decipher and analyze the various social phenomena and issues that we face today in modern society. In practice, we all know that, it is virtually impossible for any one person to be an expert in every field. The world today, however, requires graduate students to specialize in their own area of expertise, which is the field in which they particularly excel, as well as to go beyond one specific discipline and to gain enough understanding of other disciplines so that they will be able to comment on these subjects.
This basic philosophy drives the Graduate School of Social Sciences dedication to training outstanding researcher/practitioners. Our method is to provide graduate students with research guidance from a diverse array of specialist researchers. Each member of our research faculty has focused on a specific area of traditional scholarship, ranging in diversity from political science, the law, economics, business, and social sciences to history, philosophy, literature, and the sciences. As graduate school faculty, these researchers actively focus on research and education as a means of creating comprehensive and interdisciplinary social sciences.
Fostering New Types of Researchers and Practitioners
The Graduate School of Social Sciences has expanded into a program with a well-staffed research faculty which brings a diverse array of expertise to guiding students in multi-faceted research into the real-life topics that society faces today. Our graduate students study issues related to the environment, world peace, international cooperation, urbanization, social welfare, business management, life studies, regional communities, and industrial relations law. We have chosen this format because we understand how important it is in the 21st century to train new types of researchers and practitioners to tackle these problems.
The Graduate School of Social Sciences is still a young institution, but it is our youth that gives us the capacity to try a variety of innovative approaches and the vitality and optimism needed to develop the ideal. At the same time, we are also committed to further clarifying and developing our mission to ensure that we satisfy the needs of our students. It is this focus that will pave the way as our program continues to grow in the future.
More and more of our Graduate School of Social Sciences research students are pursuing their studies into the Doctoral Program and completing their doctorates. Our graduates have entered the workforce in jobs that run the various spectrum: some pursue teaching careers at universities; some have chosen to become politicians; others are forging new paths at the jobs they held while students here, as they put their higher education into practice. Still others have gone on to become nationally certified/accredited.
We are looking for a large, well-rounded student body at the Graduate School of Social Sciences and are looking forward to seeing you on the Waseda campus.