MEXT Scholarship Journey [part.1]

Ahh, Monbukagakusho scholarship, or MEXT in short is a scholarship given from Japanese Ministry of Culture, Education, and Sport for people who wants to continue their study in Japan. Yep. Only in Japan tho... My whole life changed since I failed the national entrance exam. I passed the second university but ended up not taking it due to my family's economy condition. So I took a private university which seem to be more expensive but offered tuition exemption for student mentors so it ended up cheaper.

(Not so) Brief introduction

It began when I was in the second semester of my undergraduate. The first long transition holiday from even to odd semester. Yay! 3 months holiday. No. I suddenly got bored after the first 1.5 months. During that time, I was browsing about scholarships and cool stories about those who studied abroad. But it seems like only a dream. A person like me, get a scholarship and graduate from overseas? Hahaha, who am I kidding. Despite all the thoughts, I kept reading those articles and found some full scholarships. One of them was MEXT. Honestly, I was thinking that this one must be hard to get since all who got the scholarship came from a prestigious national universities. The next problem is it seemed like the recipient should have enough Japanese language skill. I only watch animes. With english subs! Practically I listen to animes and watching the subs! Hahahahaha... Silly.

So what's so cool about Japan? The education of the graduate level. Although it is not comparable to those in the US yet. Their robotics is still good (Well, I actually know some good stuffs there like self-parking chair and recently they applied it to Ryokan as you can see from the video above), and of course, full scholarship! Hahahahaha... Well, my aunt in Bonn, invited me if I ever want to continue my study in Germany. Cool! But I have no money to go anywhere. I knew about DAAD, but I have no courage to go that far yet. Maybe in the future, but not too soon. I was not that serious during that time. But my mom told me that it would be such a blessing if I could ever go overseas to study since her friends children are doing so even since high school.

What happened then?

"Time flies" they said. I was in the 5th semester when I met this lecturer in Computer Vision class. He was an Erasmus Mundus scholarship recipient and actively doing research in his 'lab'. He told stories about his study and successfully poisoning my head with AI technologies. At the end of the semester, we have to choose either to take a year internship at a company or a year of research with classes and exams (ugh). But I didn't want to work first. My reason is simply because if I took the internship, I will have to live like an employee spending my precious youth from 8-5 with overtimes occasionally without being paid or paid with small amount of money. No. Hell no! This is exploitation.

Long story short, from February 2015, together with my research partner we decided to take a research theme under my Computer Vision and Expert System lecturer supervision in the following semester. In the same year, my campus held their first international conference and there we met a nice Japanese professor from Koganei University. He has similar research with us and using the same tools. It was nice talking to him and he invited us to his lab anytime we come to Japan. In the end of October our team won the second place of national IT contest in AI category. Our supervisor insisted us to write our research into a paper and published it. The paper finished and he gave us the journal to publish into. It failed. But he kept insisted, and in the following year, we successfully published a paper to an international conference in Japan. I think nature loves people with stubborn people.

There ends my college years. What about the scholarship? Yes, it was all in my head, but no time to do anything about it since I haven't gather much information about that. In April 2016 I started to work at a small company, it was a nice company. I told my employer about my plan to take a scholarship. He agreed with that and gave me his full support. Thanks sir! I know I was a crazy boy who ever worked in your company. Hope you never regret your decision.

[Cont. to part.2] ...