Cindy's Blog #2

Hey everyone, it’s Cindy. My topic changed drastically halfway through the course, so I will be giving my research and insights all at once.

After the first week of being in Japan, the only thing I knew about job hunting in Japan was that it is a very organized procedure with lots of seminars and job interviews. In the dormitory, there were three RAs (Resident Assistants) that I knew of who were actively job hunting at the time. One of them was Mana, who expressed her concern to me about how she started her job hunting process later than everyone else because the job hunting process started while she was still away on her year-long exchange program in America. The first weekend I arrived with the four-week program group, I remember we had an orientation and all the staff members of the dormitory were introducing themselves. Mana was away that entire weekend because she had to attend a seminar for job hunting. It made me realize how important job hunting is, and how students have to give up and compromise other responsibilities and priorities for job hunting. I often saw her leave the dorm early in the morning wearing a very typical black suit, going to attend either a seminar or job interviews. She would also come back to the dorm and be busy with preparing for job interviews, often asking other RAs to help her practice for her interviews and give her feedback about her performance. She did all of this on top of her class work as well as her duties as an RA. I also noticed that she would stay up very late every night either preparing for her job interviews or having meetings with the other RAs, so it made me realize that she was doing all this work on top of very little sleep every night. It made me believe that Japanese students have a very large tolerance towards stress, as I do not function well from not sleeping enough. It also caused me to feel concerned about the way this process is, as well as the lifestyle that Japanese students adopt as it seems that many Japanese students are able to go about their daily lives every day on less-than-optimal amounts of sleep every night.

I plan on going about my research by asking Japanese students who are currently job hunting about how much time they spend on average preparing for their interviews, what kinds of questions interviewers ask during interviews, and the kinds of tests or skill and knowledge-based assessments they may need to take. I will also ask university students who are not currently job searching about how they feel about the system and if they are doing anything to prepare for the job searching period. As I have almost no background knowledge about this subject, I hope to learn lots about the Japanese job-hunting system through my research in addition to Canadian job-hunting procedures to provide a comparison.