The 6th Overseas Visit Program of the Faculty of Science was held at UC Berkeley and Stanford University in U.S.A. Eight students from five departments gathered to participate in this international exchange program. Both of UC Berkeley and Stanford University are most prestigious universities in the world, which take leads in many academic fields and have a lot of Nobel Prize winner.

In this booklet, we would like to follow the entire program and describe about both universities, visiting of research facilities and discussions which are unique aspect of this program. We tried our utmost to illustrate what we feel and what we learn by ourselves. We believe those information based on student's viewpoint cannot get through books, articles or the Internet. Lastly, we would like to look into what the individual participants thought and gained through this program. We hope that you can find numbers of experiences and ideas that could not be gained but for this program. All of us wish Faculty of Science continues this program and our junior will be able to have the same opportunity.

All of us wish Faculty of Science continues this program and our junior will be able to have the same opportunity.

Student list

Thanks to a lot of people, this program was able to succeed. We would like to thank the Faculty of Science and the International Liaison Office for their generous support. Special thanks to Ms. Gosho Emiko for planning the schedule of our visit and for leading us through trip. By grace of not only people in our university, but also students and staffs in U.C Berkeley and Stanford University, we were able to have a good time in USA. Ms. Louis Hon and Mr. Scott McElhinney at EAP (Education Abroad Program) office of UC Berkeley and numerous PIs such as Prof. Tuneyoshi Kamae, Prof. Hitoyasu Tajima, Prof. Yoshihisa Yamamoto, Prof. Hitoshi Murayama and so on spare time for us despite their busy day. We also grateful to students in both universities; Motoki BANDAI at UC Berkeley gathered people for discussion and leaded us for dinner and sightseeing, Takaki KOMIYAMA at Stanford University gathered people for discussion and planned a tour in Clark Center for us. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to all of the students and staffs at UC Berkeley and Stanford Universities and all the people supported us at the University of Tokyo.

We, the member for this program, first gathered in January. From that, we worked in concert to prepare for the visit in March.

First, we made a mailing list for better communication and used a shared folder on the Internet. An American student in Department of Physics came to the second meeting and made a short lecture on educational system in USA. Since our destination of the visit were USA where English is an official language, we took unusual turn and did not held seminar to study language. In order to know each other better, we had a dinner at the Baseball café at Laqua. We shared the work of making pamphlet which introduces ourselves and our university. Besides, we prepared for discussion and made a 15 min long presentation of “Higher Educational System in Japan”. Some of us went shopping for souvenirs for staffs and students in USA. In addition to work together, each of us made appointments with professors who we will visit in the time for individual visit.

After the visit, we form this booklet in cooperation. Some of us keep in touch with students and PIs who they met. We would like to maintain our friendship.

We stayed in Berkeley for 5 days between 2nd and 6th March and in Stanford for 3 days between 7th and 9th March. When we got to the universities, first we attended campus tours and overview the universities. In addition, we went to dormitory tour and got a flavor of what campus life in USA might be. We also visit eminent research institutes such as LBL, SLAC and Clark Center. Besides having touched upon most-advanced research activities, we directly interact with researchers there. In both universities we had an opportunity to make a presentation and had discussion about higher education of Japan.

This year we could plan our schedule relative freely, because there was no counterpart office in UC Berkeley nor Stanford University. Therefore we came to have some free time. In order to make best use of this time, each of us visited some laboratories or lectures of interest. Thanks to the same interest, we could make deeper interchange between researchers and students than visiting in the whole.

Since we met students in UC Berkeley on the day we arrived, we were able to have dinners together for several times. For this reason we think we could cultivate good friendship with them. On the Sunday in our visit we did sightseeing in San Francisco. With a student of UC Berkeley, we got on cable cars, looked at the Golden Gate Bridge in wonder, enjoyed shopping. It was a pity that there was less time for us to join students in Stanford university, because discussion in Stanford was on the last day of our visit. Having dinner together after the discussion was least we can do, but of course we believe that we had a nice time.

(Hidehiko INAGAKI, Biophysics and Biochemistry)