ASAFAS Graduate Career Paths
- Active in International Arenas Around the Globe
The Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies offers a five-year continuous doctoral program. To be awarded a doctorate, students have first to submit a pre-doctoral thesis and pass a general examination in order to become qualified to work for a doctoral degree; they then go on to accumulate the required number of credits; and they finally submit a doctoral dissertation for evaluation and examination, after which they are awarded the degree. Roughly 20% of students gain employment after the first stage, submitting a pre-doctoral thesis and passing a general examination, and qualifying with a master’s degree. A further 20% gain employment at the second stage, having completed the doctoral degree course requirements and being awarded certification of completion of the doctoral degree course. Over the five-year period from 2007 to 2011, out of a total of 169 students, 38 obtained a master’s degree, 38 a certification of completion of the doctoral degree course, and 98 a full doctoral degree. The careers followed by our students are very wide-ranging, with some of them carrying on in academia.
Students who graduate from our program have a great deal of knowledge and fact-finding-based experience relating to the natural environment, ecology, livelihood, political economy, society and culture of Asian and African areas. They are also equipped with the ability to apply the specialist knowledge they have acquired in the course of the program flexibly and comprehensively to match the distinctive features of their particular country or area of study, which means that our graduates are active in international arenas all over the globe.
In recent years new academic fields related to Asian and African regions are becoming the focus of attention including area studies, international relations and international development, and cultural anthropology. Many of our graduates are active as leading researchers in these fields in universities and research institutes, in Japan and overseas.
In today’s rapidly globalizing world Japan’s relations with regions in Asia and Africa continue to deepen and there is an ever-growing need not only in international organizations and NPOs but in government and more widely in the corporate world for global talents with specialist knowledge in these regions. We are producing these global talents at ASAFAS.
Even those students who are engaged in careers that are not directly related to area studies are still putting the values and abilities that they learned with us, for example a dynamic can-do attitude, the importance of taking a wider perspective, and rapid and flexible problem-solving skills, to good use in their own particular fields.
