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Course Description

Master Course and Doctor Course

Graduate students at the Physics Major Course are offered two options. One is to go all the way until getting a Ph.D., and the other is to get a master degree in a shorter period of time. It is quite common in some fields in physics to move on to a career in industry after getting a master degree, while majority of graduate students in other fields prefer to complete a Ph.D. program and continue to work in academia. All the graduate students at the Physics Major Course are required to write a master thesis and pass an oral exam. For graduate students who wish to get a Ph.D., this master thesis defense serves as a qualification exam in the middle of the Ph.D. program. The period until the master thesis defense is called the master course, and the period after the master thesis defense is called the doctor course.

Large fraction of graduate students finish the master course in 2 years, and the doctor course in 3 more years, 5 years as a total. Students are required to finish those courses within 3+5 years at the longest; if a student fails to do so, then he/she will lose the student status at the University of Tokyo, in principle. [In some experiment research groups, it sometimes takes more than 5 years for an experiment to be completed and data to be analyzed. In such fields, presumably there is an idea of how to get along with this 3+5 year rule.] Students with an exceptionally fast growth track are offered an option to finish the Ph.D. program 1 year earlier.

When a graduate student wishes to proceed to the doctor course but faculty members of the Physics Major Course find that his/her academic quality is not promising enough, continuation in the Ph.D. program after the master thesis defense will be denied. Graduation with a master degree is going to be the option then. That is going to be a relatively rare case (if the admission process is functioning well), but is not ruled out entirely.

Thesis Adviser, Selection of a Field of Expertise, and Money

At the Physics Major Course of the University of Tokyo Graduate School, graduate students already have their own thesis adviser at the time they are admitted to the Physics Major Course (see Admission Process). The Pre-selection process within the admission procedure virtually plays the role of the student-adviser assignment process. An advantage of this system is that, when a student has a specific sub-field of physics of interest (such as non-equilibrium dynamics, femto-second laser technique, or string theory) but nothing else, it is guaranteed already at the time he/she is admitted to the Physics Major Course that he/she can major in that sub-field.

In this system, whether or not a graduate student is hosted by a faculty member of the Physics Major Course is decided purely on capacity of the student and the prospective adviser, and is completely independent from whether or not the prospective adviser has plenty of grant to provide a scholarship to the student. You won't be refused because of money; that can be taken as an upside of this system.

There are also a few downsides in this system. For students who wish to decide the sub-field of their expertise after learning advanced physics more, this system does not allow such a flexibility. For students in a tight financial situation, it is also a drawback of this system that there is no option to choose a research group that guarantees a scholarship. See the page of Admission Process for how graduate students apply for a scholarship.

There are upsides and downsides, but that is how things work at the Physics Major Course of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Science.

Lectures and Research

Graduate students at the Physics Major Course are required, to get a degree such as master and/or Ph.D., to take certain number of class-room lectures. The first academic year in the graduate course is enough to get this done for most of the students.

In addition to attending class-room lectures, students are supposed to engage in research projects, participate in academic group meetings of the research group they belong to, and write a thesis and pass the thesis defense. A Ph.D. thesis at the Physics Major Course is supposed to contain a new scientific research result of significant importance, and the student has to have played a major role in that research project. (Of course, it is the role of thesis advisers to support this process properly.)

Language Policy on Class-room Lectures, and Prerequisite

All the class-room lectures of the Physics Major Course available for graduate students are delivered in English: our language policy adopted for graduates students enrolling in September 2020 and beyond.

Class-room lectures for undergraduate students, on the other hand, are provided in Japanese. So, even if you wish to attend those classes to learn those materials (without earning a course credit), the language may be yet another barrier. It may happen that some subjects are not covered in the form of class-room lectures in their undergraduate curriculum and are not covered by the lectures in English at the University of Tokyo either. So, we recommend the prospective graduate students to communicate with their prospective thesis advisers (before or after the admission decision is made), to find out which subjects they are supposed to learn by themselves by reading textbooks, for example.

The following list will give you rough idea of which subjects are provided as class-room lectures in English, and which subjects are not. So we assume that the international students have already gone through the courses in the first category before coming to the University of Tokyo.

Graduate students can also take some class-room lectures provided by other departments of the University of Tokyo (such as those from Graduate School of Mathematical Science and Graduate School of Engineering) and have them counted as a part of the minimum number of lectures to take to get a degree.