Education Division Deputy Director Dr. Lin Visits Yamanashi to Discuss University Exchange Programs
The president of the University of Yamanashi, Prof. Shuichiro Maeda expressed his appreciation to Dr. Lin for the information provided. He explained that there are currently no Taiwanese exchange students at the University of Yamanashi. There had been one there in 2011 but the student had left Japan after the major earthquake in 2011, and there have been no Taiwanese international students at the university since. This is partly because the university does not have any formal academic cooperation agreements with Taiwanese universities. The university is, however, now planning to start academic exchanges with Taiwanese universities.
The University of Yamanashi established a new Life Environment department in 2012 and they are looking forward to having interaction between this new department and Taiwanese universities. Dr. Lin responded by recommending that professors from the university attend conferences in Taiwan to establish academic interaction and explore holding joint academic symposia as a preliminary step.
Dr. Lin visited the University of Yamanashi’s Green Energy Institute with its director, Prof. Hiroyuki Uchida. This institute was selected as providing the Leading Program in Doctoral Education by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2011. The selected 7-year program will end in March, 2018. Dr. Lin hopes that the institute will invite some outstanding Taiwanese students to undertake a short-term internship.
The next day, at Yamanashi Prefectural University, the president Dr. Hiroshi Ito similarly pointed out that his university had no formal interaction arrangements with Taiwanese universities although university individual professors were involved in academic exchanges. Yamanashi Prefectural University has many students learning Chinese, and most of the time these students went to its sister universities in China for exchange; until Dr. Lin’s visit, they did not have detailed information about the various possibilities for their students to pursue their Chinese language studies in Taiwan.
The university now plans to provide the information about this, about scholarships available, and the TOCFL Chinese language proficiency tests to the students. And Dr. Ito expressed his hope that the university would increase its interaction with different universities in Taiwan that have similar departments and majors.