After entering Okayama University, while enrolled in the Faculty of Environmental Science and Technology I was one of the inaugural students to take the Special Program for Global Human Resource Development, which had just been launched. In that program, in addition to the English courses for regular students, in order to acquire high-level language skills for study overseas, from the first year, students take advanced English classes taught mainly by native speakers. The program brought together students from both humanities and science faculties, and as many of them were people with distinctive personalities, I remember the program being extremely stimulating.
 The program’s curriculum includes overseas language training and study overseas, and I have had three opportunities for overseas training and study. The language training in Thailand that I participated in for the first time in my first year, made me aware of my own deficiencies in both Englishlanguage ability and communication skills. In my second year, I took part in the Water Environment Specialists Incubated by the Sunny Country exchange program offered by the Faculty of Environmental Science and Technology.

 Students from Okayama University and Kasetsart University in Thailand underwent two weeks of training together, each, inThailand and Japan, which offered numerous opportunities for fieldwork and discussion, and I became more and more determined to study overseas. In my third year, taking advantage of a short-term overseas study opportunity of the Exchange Program Okayama (EPOK), I went to the United States to study for around 10 months as an exchange student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,with the high-level classes in chemistry and environmental sciences offered by the university, but to make the best use of my limited time as an overseas student I also joined a soccer team and worked as avolunteer translator in a constant effort to interact with local students as much as possible.
 What was important was that I ended up meeting not only students from the US but also those from other countries with different backgrounds and encountered ways of thinking and feeling of which I had been ignorant until that moment, which opened up new worlds to me. This experience of studying overseas has also given me the ability to put forward my own opinions on my own accord even in unfamiliar environments and engage in events proactively; it also helped me acquire the ability to respect others and respond flexibly when communicating with them. I feel strongly thatsincereturning to Japan I have been making use of those abilities in many different situations, including university research and job hunting.
 After returning to Japan from my study in the US, I moved into the Okayama University International Student Shared House to live alongside international students, thinking that this offers me an environment in which I can maintain my English ability. Although living together with students from around the world involves culture shocks at times, the stream of new discoveries is a constant stimulation, and we are gradually coming to understand each other as we get to know better. I value the times when we can talk to each other about our countries’ cultures in everyday lives, and on weekends I take them to tourist sites to show them just how great Japan is, in the hope that their experiences and encounters during their studies overseas will be as irreplaceable as mine have been to me.

As of March 2018