Global Science Graduate Course (GSGC) at the Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo

The educational and research objectives of GSGC are to create new streams of knowledge, develop them, and pass them on to future generations in an enduring search for a fundamental understanding of nature. As a global hub for the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge, the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo seeks to build upon its strong foundation of prominent research. Here, the next generation of scientists learn the principles and methodologies within their field, while evolving into global citizens equipped with the alacrity, ingenuity, and scientific wisdom required to tackle unknown challenges in the future world. In realization of this goal, it has become essential to involve a greater number of international students. This creates a globalized learning environment for the advancement of both cutting edge education and research.

About Graduate School of Science

Education and research at the Graduate School of Science constantly aims to create and develop knowledge for the fundamental understanding of the truths of the natural world and insure this knowledge is passed on. Instruction in the concepts and methodologies of the physical sciences is given to students who will lead in the next generation, developing cosmopolitan individuals with abundant creativity and furnished with the knowledge and means to solve as yet unknown problems.

This graduate school comprises the five departments of Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science, Chemistry and Biological Sciences. In addition, the school possesses a number of affiliated centers and research institutions including the botanical gardens at Koishikawa and Nikko, the Misaki Marine Biological Station, the Research Center for Spectrochemistry, the Geochemical Research Center, the Institute of Astronomy, the Center for Nuclear Study, the Research Center for the Early Universe, the Center for Ultrafast Intense Laser Science, the Molecular Genetics Research Laboratory, the Institute for Photon Science and Technology, the Universal Biology Institute, the UTokyo Organization for Planetary Space Science and the Institute for Physics of Intelligence. Each program receives the cooperation of teaching staff both internal and external to the school and graduate programs and those affiliated with the research institutions in addition to the key lecturers, covering an extensive range of specialized fields. World class research and graduate school education is conducted on each program.

In most cases graduate students are affiliated with a laboratory and proceed with research on a variety of themes under the guidance of teaching staff. Concurrently, knowledge concerning specialized fields and related areas is deepened through lessons and seminars. For the two years of the master's program and for the subsequent three years of the doctoral program, students immerse themselves in research in order to explain a part of the natural structure of nature by means of a profound interaction with nature. The results of this is brought together as a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation, which is then examined and results in the conferral of a master's or doctoral degree. Naturally tackling a new world about which you still have many questions is immensely difficult. However it is not rare for great discoveries to be made from research led by graduate students. New ideas developed by young people in defiance of restraint are indispensable for research in the physical sciences.

At the Graduate School of Science, approximately half of the students who complete the master's program go on to enroll in the doctoral program. In turn many of the students who complete the doctoral program go on to be active primarily as teaching staff in universities and research institutions both domestically and overseas or as postdoctoral staff at the forefront of research.