Tokyo Tech Visionary Project is a compulsory subject for the first-year students at Tokyo Tech. It encourages self-discovery and aims to motivate students to set individual goals so that they can envision their own path throughout the four years of engineering studies at the undergraduate level.
Over the past few weeks, students were exposed to a variety of topics on liberal arts, ranging from art and music, leadership skills, to Japanese culture and education. Experts in those fields were invited as guest speakers to give inspiring lectures to the students, and posed several critical questions to the students in order to stimulate thinking and discussion. Then, in the group work sessions, students had the opportunity to share opinions and ideas among themselves regarding how they understood and interpreted the content of the lectures. After roughly 8 weeks of classes, finally it was time to wrap-up the whole course.
As already mentioned mentioned above, one of the main goals of this course is to motivate students to create a vision for their own future. What do you want to achieve during the four years in Tokyo Tech, and also after graduation? For what cause do you want to work passionately for?
Students were given a chance to summarize everything they have learnt from the guest speakers as well as each other, and present their individual visions in front of the whole class. This final presentation session was held in the Creative Commons Room in the Ishikawadai Building 6 on May 30th 2016. Many faculty members were also present to listen to the exciting presentations by the GSEP students.
Students were asked to write their vision in short on an A3 size paper, and use it as a visual aid for their presentations. Each person had 4 minutes to present, and 1 minute was allocated for the Q&A and feedback session. A small prize was also prepared for the best presenter, chosen through voting.
Although all the students attended the same classes and listened to the same lectures, it was interesting to find that each of them analyzed the content of the lectures in different ways, and each of them had created rather unique visions for themselves. We started off the session with a stimulating vision to “Break the Wall” by one of the students, whose vision is to constantly challenge himself and not get held back by conventional values and thinking.
Several students envisioned to explore and discover new knowledge and experiences during their stay in Japan, and through this process also inspire others into taking the next step as well. But exploring is not limited to the outside world, as there were students who aimed to explore themselves even deeper, and hopefully find some hidden potential lying within.
However, creating a vision for the future is not an easy task as no one knows what the future holds for them, and one student presented about how aimed to simply live each day to the fullest.
After all the presentations were over, the students voted on which person they thought gave the best presentation. Although everyone gave excellent presentations on their visions, there was one which stood out from the rest. Ratchatawijin Maythawee (Aom) gained the most votes to win the best presentation prize for her vision titled “Meaningful Life”. She gave a very inspiring speech on how our lives are our own “story”, and it is up to us to make our own story a meaningful one. You can view her whole presentation below.
In their presentations, many students also shared with the class how this Visionary Project course helped changed their perspective of life. It was a good opportunity for them to rethink their purposes and responsibilities as a foreign student in Japan, and also plan their next four years in Tokyo Tech in order to make it a fruitful one.
Overall, the Visionary Project course was a success, and we hope that the students will stay highly motivated with what they have gained from this course.
Written by Azril Haniz