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| For prospective students > After Graduation |
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After Graduation
For First Year Students Employment Advisors: Yosuke Imamura, Yuichi Okuda |
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Lately, a majority of physics majors continue onto Graduate Major, so the number of 4th-year students seeking employment after graduation has become quite small. Thus, in most cases, students start seeking jobs while they are in Graduate Major.
During their job search, students often times get confounded by the gap between academic evaluations by university and character evaluations by industry, or more likely at the differences in the evaluation baselines between the two. Industries seek aggressiveness, expressiveness, persuasiveness, and a willingness for engineering innovation; moreover, the quality of a student’s liberal arts training may come into play, thus there is no wonder why the grades achieved by exams and papers at college differ from how industry evaluate’s candidates. An evaluation based on your response on a sheet of paper is effective up to university level, and from then on, it is important to realize that your evaluation will be based on how you respond in interviews.
Not only for your job search but, in general, it is important to constantly update your style of learning as you progress through university. Once, when I was teaching upper-division physics, a student asked me for advice on his grades, which had been going downhill every year since high school. As we talked more, I found out that he had been intently studying with almost the same style sine he was in high school. In fact, he had been studying by himself with his textbooks and mostly didn’t interact with his fellow students.
In university, the earlier you start to study with a group and have discussions the better. Individual understanding is not enough. You also need to be able to explain and persuade others to your viewpoint. In that sense, for physics majors, it is good to have discussions with liberal arts students. Therefore, at Tokyo Tech, you are recommended to have people to study with that are outside of the Physics Department.
For example, after reading a book, I believe it is important that you get comfortable with sharing your ideas and opinions with others, because it is difficult to read with a critical mind if you are simply reading for yourself. Moreover, you will eventually learn more from the discussion with others than from the book itself. In fact, what is written in textbooks are mostly ideas that have been agreed to decades ago; making such learning insufficient.
You have some years until you will find jobs, so instead of following the latest trends, I recommend that you find your own style of learning by considering the above ideas. |
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