Cindy's Blog #3

Hey everyone, it’s Cindy again. In this post, I am going to be talking about my experience with study abroad in Japan so far as well as my research topic of job hunting.

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned about how I wouldn’t be able to function without enough sleep, but since arriving in Japan I’ve probably only had one night where I slept a full eight hours. There’s been so much to do, so many places to go, so many events, so many people to meet and talk to, in addition to studying and doing homework for my Japanese class. It’s been fun, but also exhausting and very nerve-wracking at times. I wrote in my introduction that I would like to improve my confidence in this trip, but I’ve accepted now that maybe it’s not as easy to improve in this aspect as I imagined it to be. Compared to being in Canada, I think I have moved in the opposite direction than I would have liked, becoming much more fearful, worried, and less confident in Japan than I already was, specifically when it comes to presentations and speeches. I performed extremely poorly on the presentation I had in the third week of the program and really struggled emotionally with trying to overcome it. It was very hard because my research topic changed four days prior to the final presentation about our research project, and I was extremely unprepared and under researched. I knew next to nothing about job hunting in Japan and was very stressed.

In the end, I still managed to ask a couple of the RAs a little bit about job hunting before the presentation. Daichi told me that job hunting generally starts in fourth year of university, where students start by attending seminars and classes, and eventually they start looking for jobs and sending in applications for job openings. If their applications go through, then they have a chance to attend job interviews. Mana told me that jobs usually have more than one interview and could have up to five interviews for a single company. It’s very costly to travel and usually very far, so it’s quite inconvenient and time-consuming for most job hunters. She also told me that in addition to these interviews, students must take some tests as well.

Another thing I noticed on the train and even just by seeing Mana and Misaki, two of the RAs at the dorm, was that all job hunters seem to wear the exact same black suit to their job interviews and seminars. Hair must be black and long hair must be neatly tied up. Everyone wears a black blazer, a white dress shirt, and either black dress shoes or short black heels. Males wear black dress pants and females usually wear black knee-length skirts. It looks like a very standard uniform, and I’m not sure why they must dress like this, but I will be looking into this along with my original research questions for my next blog post!