The Graduate School of System Design and Management (SDM) started the new academic year with 76 new students; 57 in the master’s course and 19 in the doctoral course. The annual introductory camp held from April 23 to 25 was attended by almost all of the new students and faculty members. SDM’s introductory camp, like the boot camps held in universities in the US and other countries, helps both new graduates and working students from various backgrounds find common ground and to gel quickly as a group.
A get-together for students, professors and SDM office staff was held on the first day. The second day began with a lecture including a discussion by Associate Professor Shirasaka on logical thinking. Then students split into groups and were assigned a system-related theme to work on for several hours before making a presentation to other groups. The students, enthusiastic about the exercise, presented some excellent concepts. Students and faculty got better acquainted at the party in the evening. At the end of the camp, Professor Naoko Nishizawa at the Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies, Keio University, gave a lecture on Fukuzawa Study and explained the spirit of Fukuzawa and the history of Keio University. Many students felt the camp was quite productive and the time was well spent.
We are accepting more and more foreign students in SDM and are enhancing our cooperation with foreign universities. We offered the crash course “Supply Chain Management Game” by Professor Paul Schoensleben from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich at the beginning of April. Together with professors from MIT, Stanford University, and Delft University of Technology, we have started Active Learning Project Sequence (ALPS). Students have plenty of chances to use English, and we encourage them to actively find opportunities to improve their language skills in our English training courses and in their daily interactions with our foreign students.
Yoshiaki Ohkami
Director, SDM Research Institute
Dean, Graduate School of System Design and Management