Yesterday, I went for the 2019 MEXT Scholarship Briefing session. But this time, I went as one of the scholars and I was there to help answer questions about the scholarship. My seniors asked me to go, and since I remember attending a scholarship briefing session like that a few years back (and that was the reason why I decided to apply for the MEXT scholarship), I decided that the least I could do was to attend and answer whatever questions there were.

The scholarship briefing session was broken up into four main parts. First, a representative from the Embassy of Japan talked about the basics of the scholarship. Next, two of my seniors shared their MEXT scholarship journey. After that, representatives from Kyoto University and Waseda University talked about programmes their universities have for international students. The last section was a Q&A session, which is where a few other scholars and I answered questions from prospective scholarship applicants.

I won’t bore you guys with details about MEXT, especially since I blogged about it quite a bit before, but I did find the Kyoto University iUP pretty interesting so I’ll just share a bit about that. Kyoto iUP stands for Kyoto University International Undergraduate Programme and it’s Kyoto University’s bilingual program for undergraduates. You can find out more about the programme here, but two things caught my eye:

1. Japanese-language education: The programme has a 6-month language course before you start your courses proper, and the last two years of university will be conducted mainly or completely in Japanese. For the first two years, the lessons are in English, but you will be studying Japanese as well. This is pretty cool, especially since the weakness of most G30 (English-language programmes) was that many students never got to the point where they could study in Japanese, despite living in Japan for their entire undergraduate degree.
2. Scholarship Possibilities: According to the university, it’s possible to get full or partial waivers for the language programme and the undergraduate course. As far as I can tell, the only fees that cannot be waived are the application fees. There are also merit-based scholarships.

These two points make the programme sound like a pretty good deal to me. I think the MEXT scholarship is a bit more generous, given that it covers a one year language programme plus all fees and a living allowance, but if that’s not your thing (or you don’t want to study entirely in Japanese), the Kyoto iUP is a nice alternative.

Another highlight of the briefing (for me) would be seeing pamphlets for Kyushu University. There are a few more MEXT scholars there now compared to my time, but there are still woefully few Singaporeans – in fact, there might not be any Singaporeans if there isn’t anybody in the G30 programme.

And that’s about it from me. It’s somewhat funny that I’m talking about a non-MEXT programme for most of this post on the MEXT briefing, but the iUP was too interesting not to share. The turnout seemed pretty good this year, so fingers crossed that we get more and more students in Japan.