Graduate Sub-Program in Electrical Engineering and Energy for Improvement of Practical Abilities and Future Preparation -supported by MEXT as a part of Program for Promoting Inter-University Collaborative Education

This graduate sub-program aims at developing, by cooperation among the five universities and industries, students' practical abilities of communication, planning and team-playership which are critical to successful collaborative work in various scenes in the society. It will help the students prepare for their own future and make excellent engineers and researchers who play active and important roles in the vital industrial field of electrical engineering and energy.

At universities there are an increasing number of graduate students who cannot envision their own future. From industries come comments that the students do not have broad perspective, strong eagerness, and/or good abilities of communication and collaboration. It is crucial to solve these issues and educate young people so that they can actively and livelily work in the society.

The educational activities include omnibuses of lectures, stay-over research presentations and discussions, and research presentations at international conferences. The omnibuses of lectures extend the traditional one-way lectures to bidirectional lectures with discussions covering wider ranges of topics including those by oversea lecturers. In the stay-over research presentations and discussions, the students make presentations on their research to professors and students from other universities as well as engineers and researchers from industries, and have discussions with them. The atmosphere here is intimate but more stimulating than in their own research groups back home. The evaluations on the students are made from the viewpoints of engineers and researchers from industries as well.

The students in this sub-program will be exposed to much stimulation which then will enhance their motivations and eagerness toward their own futures. Also their abilities of communication will be strengthened by presentations to and discussions with 'strangers'. Taking part in planning and operation of those activities together with other students will reinforce the students' planning skills and team-playership. The improvement of those abilities will be quantitatively evaluated by a curriculum inventory based assessment system. It is the goal of the sub-program that in the end of academic year 2014, thirty students with those improved abilities finish the sub-program, and that thereafter the same number of students complete the program every year.