Graduate Interview
Natee, Inc.
HIDA , Takahiro（Graduated from the School of Advanced Science and Engineering in 2020）
Unable to get absorbed in my chosen field of study, I explored other paths
I’m currently working in a venture company that runs an influencer-based advertising agency. It’s a path I’d never imagined I’d take when I first started at WASEDA. I realized again that the many encounters I had and new things I tried during my student life led me to this choice. I originally entered the School of Advanced Science and Engineering aspiring to be a research chemist, but in my first year, I found myself unable to get fully absorbed in chemistry alone. From then on, I expanded my scope of activities to learning outside my major, extracurricular activities, and extramural ones as well, in order to find out what I really wanted to do.
One of these activities was working as a student volunteer at WASEDA’s Career Center. The volunteers were responsible for planning and managing career-related programs on their own. My approach was to interview WASEDA students who’d found what they wanted to do while at WASEDA and were dedicating themselves to pursuing it, and publish their stories as a series of articles. I have always seen students talking powerfully about their vision in their own words, it inspired me to challenge myself even more, too.
My interest in education grew from my own experiences
Another thing I invested considerable effort in during my student life was activities related to education. After thinking again about the meaning of learning at WASEDA, I thought more and more about what a university is. This inspired a new future goal of creating a new university that would be a place to explore and think about ways of living. With the aim of deepening my understanding of education, I worked as a teacher at a private-tutoring school that specialized in AO admission exams while I was at WASEDA. This also gave me an opportunity to get involved in mentoring high school students taking AO exams. After that, I started interning at a company started up by a WASEDA alumnus. I became an employee there after graduating, and have been working there ever since. Another factor that led to the choice of working at a venture company was the inspiration I got from the Career Center interview program to put myself in a challenging environment, as well.
Your four years at university are your time to learn however deeply and widely you want. Savor that freedom to the full, and don’t limit yourself.
【Encounters at WASEDA】Interviewing people gave me tips on learning about new areas
While working both inside and outside the university, I lost all reluctance to start learning about a new area from square one. Both the student interview program and activities related to education provided many occasions to engage with themes and topics I knew nothing about that came up in conversation with other people. Each time this happened, I learned about the new theme and so on starting from the basics, and as I repeated this process, I gradually started to get the hang of how to learn. For example, getting to grips with the most important points in the area first and consciously picking up on how things were related to each other enabled me to learn more efficiently. Acquiring the ability to understand the overall picture of an area I’m tackling for the first time and the mutual relationship is also helping me in my current job.
- Word of mouth helped me find successful WASEDA students
Through the interview program I worked on as a student volunteer at the Career Center, I got the interviewees to introduce me to more and more of the most amazing people they knew. Thanks to this, I got to meet students with big ambitions.
- I launched a career support organization, and worked for it actively
Wanting to provide a place where students could hear work stories from WASEDA alumni more easily, I set up a student association with friends from outside the university, and worked for it actively.
- I wrote a graduation thesis on the theme of higher education
I expanded my studies beyond chemistry, and chose an anthropology lab course. Having become interested in higher education, I made that the focus of my lab study.
【Current Job】I learned how challenging and fulfilling it is to aim for the best within a framework
Natee produces influencers, and as an environment where many young people in their teens and twenties gather together, it’s a community that’s similar to a school. I feel this is also going to be a learning experience that’ll help toward my own goal of creating a new university in the future. I find it very fulfilling to engage with young people who challenge themselves by leveraging their own powers of expression and talents, and to help them expand their range of activities and contact with society through my work.
Being able to coordinate things steadily with the relevant parties is essential to getting results, and I also need to be able to balance things in order to aim for the best within a fixed time and framework. When I was a student, I might not have been someone who’d tackle a challenge tenaciously and not run away. I’d like to continue to challenge myself as well, in order to help create a society in which diverse ways of living are more widely accepted.
※This article is reprinted from Future Design Guidebook 2021.
