Three policies
Diploma Policy
A Master's Degree is awarded to students who fulfill the requirements for completion of the Master's Program. To fulfill the requirements, students must have been enrolled for at least the required period, earned the required credits, given a mid-term presentation, and passed their thesis defense and final examination. There is also an option by which students can complete their degrees by means of a Master's project to be completed in lieu of writing a Master's thesis. Students who fulfill the specific requirements for each program or course will, at the time of completion, be awarded a Certificate of Completion for that program or course, in addition to a Master's Degree.
Doctoral students are expected to formulate, plan, and implement their own projects, and apply their original results to the domains of media and governance through the development of new concepts, specialized research, and new methodologies. To be awarded a Doctoral Degree, they must obtain Doctoral candidate status by satisfying requirements regarding, among other things, the ability to use a foreign language, development of an original syllabus, earning of credits for skill-building courses, presenting of a Doctoral dissertation research proposal(Thesis Proposal), and teaching of a course appropriate to their degree. Students pursuing the Career Professional track may be exempt from certain requirements conditional on possessing appropriate professional experience. Once a student has been awarded Ph.D. candidate status, a dissertation hearing and final examination by the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee are held to determine whether the dissertation merits the award of a Doctoral Degree. If both the hearing and final examination are passed, a decision on whether to award a degree is then made by the Graduate School Committee.
Curriculum Policy
The main objective of the Master's Program is to produce professionals with the expertise and practical skills to identify and solve problems to meet the needs of society. The everyday locus of research activity for Master's students is their Academic Project. The Academic Project allows students to engage in advanced research guided by multiple faculty members who share the same research themes and interests. Through the involvement in Academic Projects, students will not only take lectures in conventional formats, but also engage in practical research and fieldwork, participate in internships, and promote social implementation. A combination of on-site and online instructional formats will allow students to pursue their projects in a flexible learning environment.
The aim of the Doctoral Program is to train researchers, educators, and other specialists with advanced expertise, accurate reasoning skills, and an abundance of originality. The curriculum is built around research and dissertation supervision. Following their own research plans, students receive advice and supervision from a Research Advisory Group made up of faculty members in the Graduate School of Media and Governance and other researchers on how to pursue their research and write their Doctoral dissertation.
Admissions Policy
The mission of the Graduate School of Media and Governance is to inquire into the present circumstances of mankind and society from multi-faceted and interdisciplinary perspectives using cutting-edge technology. The graduate school trains researchers, educators, and practitioners so that they can deeply understand each link in the process of creating, researching, testing, implementing, and evaluating ideas to deliver research outcomes applicable to our daily lives.
The curriculum allows students to design their research plan flexibly in accordance with their chosen theme across a wide range of fields, including policy, governance, social innovation, environment, ICT, design, physical skills, and bioscience. The graduate school is a research platform at which the diverse student body, which includes international students and professionals, gather to share in knowledge work.
Our experience of the influence of COVID-19 over the past approximately two years has proven an opportunity to rethink the paradigm of graduate school education. We will continue to stress the importance of the sites of activity which cannot be neglected for monozukuri manufacturing processes and social implementation, while flexibly adapting to the changing social environment. We are meanwhile also endeavoring to facilitate the evolution of learning and education incorporating online formats, which we have been deploying to unprecedented levels. Ours is a graduate school open to the international community, which includes a double degree system with overseas graduate schools.
We aspire to attracting students who will engage with a variety of subjects and challenges rather than confining themselves to their undergraduate specializations or individual academic domains. Students can choose to enroll in either April or September, and entrance examinations are held twice a year. The entrance examination comprises two stages, a document screening and an interview, for an integrated evaluation of an applicant's research plan and capacities. Those applying from overseas will be evaluated solely by means of a document screening.