Our first Alumni Talk in May was well received by the students, giving them a practical picture of their future career path in Japan. To further provide them with an insight into the career development, we organised the second Alumni Talk on June 17th with Mr. Ryza Rynazal, a GSEP graduate (2021) from Indonesia. Currently working as a software engineer at Woven by Toyota, Ryza shared his experiences on how he developed his competencies and chose his path. Cetin Mert Murat, a first year student from Turkey, gives us his reflections on the session:
A CONCRETE EXAMPLE
・GSEP(GLOBAL SCIENTIST AND ENGINEERS PROGRAM) was founded in 2016 was founded in 2016 under School of Environment and Society Department of Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering.
・”We aim to develp individuals who can create new technologies, values, and concepts to meet social demand, and are willing to address complex global issues by taking a multi-perspecive appoach while applying expertise in science and engineering”.
Dear readers, before we start, I want you to read the two important information I wrote above about GSEP. You can access this information from GSEP’s official website and application guideline, please take a look.
GSEP was founded in 2016 to aim to train international scientists and engineers, and Ryza-san is one of the students who entered this department in 2017. The seminar presented by Ryza-san is very important for a freshman like me also for candidates who want to apply to GSEP in 2025. Because we have a real example. Ryza-san applied to GSEP in 2017 with a goal very similar to ours, to become a more innovative, more competent, more successful individual, a scientist, an engineer. Also Tokyo Tech aims to raise those kind of engineers and scientists. And now in 2024, you can see Ryza-san is a part of creating better society by using technology because he is an engineer at Woven by Toyota, and Woven by Toyota is a new company which was established for this goal, developing new technologies. Now let me tell you a little about the experiences Ryza-san shared with us in the seminar.
First Ryza-san had decided what kind of engineer he wanted to be by determining his interests and abilities, and decided that he was interested in the field of data analysis and software in line with these abilities and interests. In this regard, as of the second year summer break, he asked himself a question: ‘What can I do in summer break?’ Then he improved himself in the field of data analysis and software with various online courses and started looking for an internship. He managed to find an internship in a traditional Japanese company such as Mitsubishi Fuso. This is really interesting. You start working towards your goals early, which is exactly the behavior you would expect from someone studying at GSEP. Then when he reached a certain proficiency in data analysis, he assisted a professor in the field of neurology at Hiroshima University, whose office is in Tokyo, for data analysis. Later, while he was doing his master’s degree at Tokyo Tech, he published his article on data analysis and took his competence to the next level, making himself ready for the business world. This is a great example for freshmen like us and candidates like you. We have a global scientist and engineer who literally works for his goals in front of us.
Moreover, although he did not have a level of Japanese knowledge even at the N5 level when he started Tokyo Tech, he reached the N2 level with disciplined study after few years, so if you are worried about Japanese, do not worry.
To conclude, I saw the concrete result of the establishment of GSEP in this seminar. GSEP was established to train its students to be more innovative and competent scientists and engineers. Ryza-san applied to GSEP because he wanted to become a more competent and innovative person and after 7 years, he was truly competent. He became an innovative engineer based on his works and researches. I extend my best wishes to all engineers, scientists and candidates who build and want to build a better future and society using technology.