School of Humanities and Social SciencesWaseda University

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

From the Dean

TANIGUCHI Shinko

Universities are the final stage of the long educational journey that you started in elementary school. Some students go on to graduate school while many graduate and enter the job market. It is up to you to decide what kind of job you want to get and what kind of life you want to lead. During your four years at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), we want you to acquire cross-disciplinary (horizontal) education and deep (vertical) insight backed by expertise so that you can live a strong life as a member of society. To put it simply, we want you to aim to be what I call a “T-shaped person.” 

A wide range of information has become readily accessible online in recent years. At the National Diet Library of Japan and the Gallica Digital Library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, some of the books in their collections are available to the public for viewing. Waseda University offers an impressive range of library services and enables users to search for academic information, including encyclopedias and dictionaries in numerous fields, as well as to view research papers. As long as you have the skill to search for information, it is not so difficult to examine written materials or papers about certain themes and acquire a broad range of knowledge. It is now relatively easy to expand your knowledge horizontally.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the amount of knowledge you can gain on the Internet. Today, we frequently find ourselves inundated with the sheer volume of information accessible on the Internet. In fact, the information we can access online is only a fraction of the extensive academic knowledge that has been accumulated over eons. Another problem we may encounter is how we should interpret the data and materials that we have collected. I’m sure many of you have the experience of gaining a wealth of knowledge from the information you searched for with great interest, only to realize that you almost lost sight of the big picture. Gathering a vast amount of data using a keyword search tool or looking for research findings in related disciplines is just like arranging the food ingredients you have bought from a supermarket on the table. Take cooking for instance. You cannot even serve one portion of a meal without first understanding how to prepare, cut, and season the ingredients or mastering the skills involved. Similarly, in order to carefully examine a particular issue, you need to learn about the fundamental approaches and analytical techniques in your specialized field, review previous research findings, and acquire a deep level of insight. 

HSS offers 18 different courses to choose from according to your specific interests. First-year students identify a theme that interests them by reading books or searching for materials in various fields. When they are in the second year, they advance into a specific course and deepen their specialty scholarship. The most distinctive feature of HSS has to be a graduation thesis. A graduation thesis represents a compilation in the final work of scholarship at HSS or a condensed version of the life you have lived up to that moment.

I wish you all the best in your university life, and I hope you will have a fulfilling experience as a “T-shaped person” with cross-disciplinary (horizontal) education and deep (vertical) insight.