Sodai.org

Getting in: The Interview

In my previous post, I covered applying to SILS. After you submit your application, you have an agonizing wait until you get the results of your document screening. I probably mentioned this already, but the application process has two main parts: the document screening and the interview. After both of these, some people make the cut, and some people get turned down. Those who make it past the interview get accepted. I'll be talking about the interview process in this post.

Summary of the Interview Process

1. Hour-long essay writing test, choice of prompt from a list of 3.
2. 20 minute long interview with SILS faculty via teleconference.

But first, I'll talk a little about your chances.

Getting in: Applying to SILS

Hello everyone! I'm Greg, a new writer for Sodai.org. I'll begin attending SILS in the April 2010 term, and I thought I ought to keep one of the few English-language SILS resources alive and kicking. I know that a lot of people have questions about the application and enrollment process, so I can't think of a more fitting series of articles to start with. The SILS application process probably had the greatest number of hoops that I've ever had  to jump through in order to accomplish something. Luckily, the SILS admissions office is relatively flexible and helped me fix my mistakes. But why make mistakes when you can read about mine and avoid them?

Most colleges in America have fancy online applications these days. SILS prefers to keep it old-school and your first step is compiling a large number of documents and mailing them during the application period. The application process has two stages: if you pass this step, you'll be interviewed and tested, and then you might get accepted. Most people get eliminated in the first step (this one!) so be very careful. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the For Applicants section of the SILS website, because you'll be going there a lot. The next term open for applications is Fall 2010, and I'll be using it in my examples. Although the first application period for Fall 2010 doesn't begin until January 7, it's a good idea to begin assembling your application now, or at least a month before. You want to apply early so that you have time to correct any mistakes you might have made and get the corrected documents mailed before you're out of luck.

This was my completed application. It really is a large number of documents.

The Future of Sodai.org

I finished my one-year exchange at Waseda, and I'm not quite sure what to do with this site. I don't have a ton more to say about SILS, but I do think there's a place for uncut dialogue and commentary about goings-on at Waseda. I'm going to leave this blog as it is, and if anyone is interested in writing for it, comment here and I'll set you up with a free guest-author account. I won't exercise any editorial control over your posts (unless they're particularly obscene or slanderous), so go wild and turn this site into a cool resource for your fellow SILSians.

As for me, I'll still be blogging this year, but stuff will be a little more general and a little less Japan-focused. If you've got any random questions about life at Waseda, you can always email me at davidatdshackdotnet (changing the "at" and "dot" to the appropriate symbols).

Cheers, David Shackelford

Use Waseda Wi-Fi with Your iPhone or iPod Touch

If you go to Waseda and have an iPhone or iPod touch, you know that the school's ridiculous network won't let you access the Waseda wireless network with your device. Waseda requires you to use both a VPN client and an HTTP proxy to get on the internet, and the iPod/iPhone can't do both simultaneously...until now.

Apple's latest iPhone OS (free for the iPhone, $9.99 for the iPod) finally fixes this problem, allowing you to associate an HTTP proxy from the VPN settings panel. You don't have to know what that means to get on the web, just follow these directions, and you'll be good to go:

From the home screen, click "Settings," then "General," then "Network," then "VPN." Fill in the settings as below, replacing "shakku@waseda.jp" and the password with your own campus login (same as your email account).

Under "secret," enter "group."

Click "save" and you should be good. Slide the VPN switch to "on," and you'll be able to access the web over wi-fi. The iTunes store doesn't work, presumably because it needs a secure connection, but email and other apps should be fine.

Scientists at Waseda Create Emotional Robot

From Tokyo CBS:

A walking humanoid robot that is able to use its whole face and body to express emotion was unveiled on Tuesday in Japan. The robot was created by scientists at Tokyo's Waseda University and is thought to be the first of its kind according to its makers. It is able to express a range of different emotions, including happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, anger and disgust, by opening and closing its eyes, moving its lips and eyebrows, and using its arms and legs.

Yo, that is some scary shit. Full story here.

Eww....Midterms!

It's getting to that disgusting time of the year again, that time when you actually have to make a semblance of an effort to pass your courses at Waseda. Pick your head off the desk, pay a bit of attention to the sensei, and cram it up, because it's midterm season!

If you're drowning in your classes, here are some tools to help:

• Anki: this will change the way you memorize kanji. I owe my passing grade in Japanese to this.

• Rikaichan: this will change the way you read Japanese online. I owe my job to this.

• Leechblock: you can set your browser to lock yourself out of productivity-killers like Facebook and Twitter. Amazing.

• Study Hacks: this will change the way you approach college as a whole. I wish I had known about this three years ago.

If you're still having trouble...sucks to be you! Seriously, though, eat well, sleep, don't stress, study ahead of time, and try to put the heavy drinking off until these stupid tests blow over.

Waseda University and The H1N1 Swine Flu

Here's what Waseda first had to say about swine flu (all these notifications come to our email inboxes market "URGENT":

There has been confirmed cases of people being infected by the swine influenza in Mexico, the United States and several other countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that its pandemic alert level will be increased from Phase 3 (sporadic cases or small clusters of disease in people, but has not resulted in human-to-human transmission sufficient to sustain community-level outbreaks) to Phase 4 (verified human-to-human transmission of an animal or human-animal influenza reassortant virus able to cause "community-level outbreaks") on April 27th.

If any confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission occur, Waseda University will cancel classes, close campus, and have students be on-call at home. Also any activities or extracurricular activities planned on-campus will all be cancelled.

Please make sure to take precautionary measures such as stockpiling essential items such as food and water.

Hmm...there are a couple hundred confirmed cases in Japan, but we still have classes. I'll bet you that once the flu shows up within the Tokyo city center (ie within the Yamanote line), they'll shut school for a week.

Now they're really swinging into action: if you have swine flu, they'll- wait for it- excuse your absence from class! Does this apply if you go and test negative, or only if you actually have it?

As previously announced, Waseda University is continuing to conduct classes, research and extracurricular activities as usual. Should developments with the influenza A (H1N1) epidemic make it necessary to suspend classes in the future, a formal announcement will be made to that effect. In the meantime, any students experiencing flu-like symptoms are urged to make contact with the special influenza advisory centers that have been established by Japanese authorities for that purpose. A list of such centers follows below. Should you feel ill and suspect that you may have succumbed to infection, please seek and follow medical advice. Refrain from coming to the university. In particular, please adhere carefully to any direction from a medical professional that you should recuperate at home and avoid contact with others. If diagnosed as likely to be suffering from the new strain of influenza please make contact with the Waseda University Health Support Center via telephone whilst remaining at rest at home or under medical supervision. Upon full recovery please present a medical certificate (Shindansho) to your host faculty or graduate school office and complete the relevant form for leave of absence from class (‘kesseki todoke’). When this formality has been completed, the University and your professors can then apply special consideration to your circumstances.

I guess I appreciate the sentiment, but what a painfully stiff email!

Waseda Bloggers

People blogging Waseda:

• Nate picks apart all the ramen and noodle shops in the Waseda/Takadanobaba area at Waseda Ramen
• The other Nathan, an exchange student from Oregon, is A Gaijin in Tokyo
• My buddy Eman blogs his crazy-awesome host family at Eman's Travel Blog, and also writes a gourmand's impression of Tokyo at College Kid's Cooking.
• Evie's a British girl I had class with last semester. Find her at Evie in Japan.
• Noah and Yuki double-team Tokyo at Lost Souls.
• Sami, a pretty nifty Australian, writes Shinjuku Shining Star.
• The Waseda Business Association is an excellent blog to follow if you're wondering about finding work or internships in Japan, or if you just want a student perspective on current Japanese business events.
• The international circle 虹の会 (niji no kai) has a PR blog.
• ...and lastly, yours truly just kicked off a Tumblr blog to mix my photos into my longer posts. If you just want words, you can find those here, but my Tumblr mixes everything I do into one super-blog.

Non-Waseda, but still cool:

• Allison studies at Keio and takes pretty pictures at 24:00
• JapanSoc is a community for any and all Japan-related bloggers

Want to start your own blog? I use Typepad, but Tumblr's been growing on me a lot recently. You can also write for this blog if you'd like; we're looking for people to carry this on when we all go home or graduate.

Happy reading!

Waseda Grads in the News: Manabu Miyazaki

As you might expect with one of the top schools in the nation, Waseda graduates often go on to do pretty cool things. Today's Japan Times has an article on one of our most interesting alumni, Manabu Miyazaki:

Miyazaki's life... has been nothing if not exceptional and eventful. Born as the second son of a yakuza boss in Kyoto, he grew up interacting with reckless but warmhearted members of the extended underworld "family," which also ran a demolition business.

Then, influenced by his left-leaning private tutor, he was won over to Marxism while in high school, and soon after he entered the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo in 1965, he was busy networking, organizing and demonstrating as a member of the Japanese Communist Party in that decade's numerous, and often violent, student protests against "injustices," such as tuition-fee hikes and issues such as Japan's postwar treatment of its Korean residents.

However, like many others who were deeply involved in that movement, Miyazaki ended up dropping out of college. Then, after a brief stint as a reporter at a weekly magazine, he went back to Kyoto to take over the troubled family business, trying to meet one bank debt obligation after another.

Along the way, he says, desperation drove him to start getting involved in riskier business deals. The debts, though, kept growing, and the demolition company finally went bankrupt owing ¥2.5 billion on Oct. 25, 1980 — Miyazaki's 35th birthday. Persuading angry creditors to write off the debts exasperated him further, especially when some took to threatening him personally with swords and pistols. Then, in an unrelated incident, on one occasion in 1986 two gunmen stormed into a Kyoto cafe and shot him and the two men he was with. Though he recovered from the bullet that went through his stomach, his companions both died on the spot.

But Miyazaki's drama-packed life wasn't all bad during that decade in which Japan's asset-inflated bubble was growing at its most heady rate. In fact, he rode the wave in style, amassing huge sums — and spending lavishly — by landing one real-estate deal after another as a jiageya (land shark), whose job it is to nudge or intimidate individual owners of small parcels of land to sell them and make way for major property developers to move in.

The full article is worth a read- it goes on to interview the author about reactions to his autobiography, life in the underworld, and the place of organized crime in modern society.

Waseda Football Sokeisen: It's Football Time Again!

Kanji lesson! Take the 早 from 早稲田, the 京 from 京王, and the 戦 from 戦争, and you get 早京戦, or soukeisen, the Waseda-Keio War! The game starts at noon this Wednesday, somewhere called Komasawa field. I actually have no idea where that is, but a girl named Jennifer has her contact info up on the Facebook event, and can probably get you there.

Reminder: Globalation Vol 2, our all-night club party in Roppongi, is also happening this Wednesday.