On its second year, the Tokyo Tech Visionary Project continues to provide an avenue for the first year Tokyo Tech students to discuss and share their thoughts about relevant events and topics in our society today. The main purpose of this subject is to encourage self-discovery and to motivate students to set individual goals so that they can envision their own path throughout the four years of liberal arts studies at the undergraduate level. We are starting our Tokyo Tech Visionary Project entries again here in the GSEP website. This is our entry for the first of the series of lectures that we will have for the English class of Tokyo Tech Visionary Project 2017.
Prof. Jun Fudano, a distinguished professor from the Institute of Liberal Arts gave the first lecture and the subject orientation to the new batch of GSEP students. At the first part of his talk, he talked about Tokyo Tech and its new education system that started in April 2016. In this new system, the Institute of Liberal Arts was established and spearheaded the Tokyo Tech Visionary Project Course which is highly related to the Japanese term 立志 “risshi”, that basically means vision, aspiration, or purpose in life. He stressed the importance of incorporating the study of liberal arts in an engineering school such as Tokyo Tech.
In the second part of his talk, he focused on the topic ethics education, as it is being used to promote the well-being of individual engineers and the society. To further elaborate his topic, he discussed about engineering ethics and the concept of happiness to the students. It was a very informative lecture and the students were all very attentive until the end of the talk. After the lecture, we asked the students to write in their reflection note the summary of the lecture and also their thoughts about it, and some questions about the topic that they want to probe further during our group work session next meeting.
The group work that they did in the following meeting proved to be equally interesting as well. We started with a brief ice breaker to warm up the members of the group with each other. However, the 1st year GSEP students showed great group dynamics that an ice breaker was really not necessary. The students were grouped into 4-5 people and asked to share what they wrote in their reflection notes. They exchanged reflection notes and were asked to write the notable points in their “entakuns”, the round table papers. This they did so enthusiastically as you will see in the pictures below.
To close the group work session, the a final discussion question was posted. They were asked what kind of society would they want to make. This started a very lively discussion, most of the students eagerly raised their hands to share their answers. Some answers that were given by the group said that they want to make a society where everyone is both physically and mentally healthy, wherein everybody would have their own real goals and yet would be able to cooperate together, if needed, for a common goal. They answered that they want to make a society where everybody is equal and fair regardless of the language, gender and race.
Overall, the discussion was very active and very interesting. The students voiced out their opinions and thoughts eloquently. Even though time was a little bit constrained, there were a lot of thoughts and opinions that were heard from the group. Indeed, this is a very interesting batch and as one of their lecturers in this class, I am also looking forward to hear more from them in our future talks and group activities in this course.
Written by: Eden G. Mariquit