Today, with spring arriving in Muroran, holding the 2026 entrance oath ceremony in the presence of distinguished guests and Professor Emeritus teachers is a great celebration for all faculty, staff, and students of Muroran Institute of Technology.

Congratulations to all the new students on your admission. I would also like to express my sincere respect and congratulations to your families and all those involved who have provided a supportive learning environment and encouraged your efforts over many years.

This year's enrollment consisted of 638 Faculty of Science and Engineering bachelor's degree students, 39 transfer students, 238 graduate Master’s Course, and 8 Doctoral Course students, totaling 923 students.

Regarding the proportion of students entering this year's Faculty of Science and Engineering (daytime and evening main courses) from their high schools, the rate of admission from outside Hokkaido was 32.8%, lower than the record high of 43.4% in fiscal year 2023. Nevertheless, the upward trend has continued over the past several years, with students enrolling from all over the country, including all 41 prefectures. Additionally, the number of Japanese female students enrolled in undergraduate programs has reached a record high of 106 (17.0%), continuing the upward trend in recent years. There are 18 international students from overseas, 18 in undergraduate and 10 in graduate school, totaling 28. Although this is still somewhat fewer than the 50s just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the total number of international students, including current students, reached 156 as of April, making it a university with an environment full of global diversity in classrooms, laboratories, and throughout the campus.

Today, I would like to share with you some of the educational reforms that our university is currently undertaking, as well as some of my expectations regarding what you should keep in mind during your time here.

As a national science and engineering university located in Muroran, Hokkaido, we believe that solving the challenges facing Hokkaido will lead to solving the challenges facing Japan and even the world, and we are committed to educational and university reform.

At the Faculty of Science and Engineering, which was reorganized from Faculty of Engineering seven years ago, we promote science, mathematics, and information education unique to science and engineering universities, nurturing students who understand and master the essence of ICT and AI and can contribute to manufacturing and value creation. By providing compulsory university-wide information education, we have been certified by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the "Mathematical Science, Data Science, and AI Education Program" since the 2021 academic year.

Additionally, the Graduate School Master’s Course (MC) curriculum aims to enrich the common required information courses, each course leveraging its unique characteristics. Furthermore, in April two years ago, we newly established "Course of Cross-Disciplinary Informatics" within the Division of Information and Electronic Engineering. This course, as the course name suggests, is "Informatics created together with various specialized fields." As the course name suggests, informatics transcends different academic fields and specialized fields, combining various specialized knowledge and methodologies to tackle today's complex problems. It is designed as a course to cultivate students who can generate new ideas and solutions. As a result, most of the new students are graduates from all science and engineering faculties beyond just the information field, and last month, 54 students who completed this course as the first cohort have gone on to explore all fields of industry, making use of their specialized studies from their respective faculties.

At the Graduate School Doctoral Course (DC), we have been selected for the Next-Generation Researcher Challenge Research Program by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), greatly enhancing financial and research support for students. This program accelerates the development of interdisciplinary human resources by combining the university's top-level computer science discipline with various scientific and technological fields such as architecture, civil engineering, mechanical aviation, electrical and electronic engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology.

In this way, the development of highly advanced science and engineering talent, which integrates fields such as 'specialized × information,' has been a consistent policy at our university through Faculty of Science and Engineering, Graduate Master’s Course (MC), and Graduate Programs (DC).

To all of you who have enrolled at this university today, I sincerely hope that you will grow into highly skilled science and engineering professionals who can play an active role on the world stage, utilizing this system.

Now, I'd like to share a few thoughts, especially with freshmen and undergraduate students who are setting foot on a university campus for the first time.

The first thing I'd like to mention is about academics.

The university life that is about to begin is not just about freedom; it also carries the profound meaning of shedding your old self and forming a transformed, different personality. Therefore, to put it a little dramatically, your studies at university should be something that will support your future life and form the foundation for your future social life. You must not simply absorb knowledge, but use it as a weapon to grow yourself. With this in mind, at university, the two characters for "study" are written not as "learn and practice," but as "master and learn." You are not learning from a teacher, but mastering and learning on your own.

The national standards for university establishment stipulate that "45 hours of study are required for one credit-level course," and next to that, it says, "For lectures, 15 hours of class time will equal one credit." Just like high school, there are some rather arbitrary aspects, such as calculating one hour as actually being a 45-minute class, and the idea of counting the number of subjects as credits is also the same as high school, but you may not have been very aware of this until now.

But the point here is,

"Although a course worth one credit requires 45 hours of study, in reality, universities only need to teach 15 hours, which is one-third of that amount."

This is where the calculations don't add up. What about the remaining 2/3, 30 hours? That's time for preparation and review. In other words, you could say that the law stipulates that "university students must study at home twice as long as they spend in classes."

In fact, when I was a student 40 years ago, university lectures were entirely based on the assumption of self-study and homework time, so it was common knowledge that "what university professors talk about in lectures is completely incomprehensible the first time you hear it without preparation." Nowadays, thankfully, such lectures have almost disappeared, and most professors conduct their lectures with the connection to high school classes in mind. However, if, by any chance, you happen to encounter a lecture that you don't understand at all next week, remember this story before you experience culture shock, and try to psych yourself up a little and review the lecture content.

To reiterate, while studying in high school was relatively passive, university studies require a complete shift in approach, becoming active, self-directed, and driven by your own desires. I strongly urge you to shift gears from your previous study methods as early as possible, ideally during the first semester of your first year. Then, during the following four years until graduation, I hope you will not only acquire knowledge but also learn how to utilize it—in fact, the essence of science and engineering lies in how to actually put that knowledge to practical use—through a variety of experiences.

The second thing I want to talk about is my friends.

You've all met many people in elementary, middle, and high school. Of those people, how many are friends you'll continue to have long-lasting relationships with? You'll meet even more people after graduating from university and entering the workforce, but how many of them will become true friends? Many true friends, lifelong friends, begin with encounters during your university days, free from any vested interests. Looking back, of the approximately 100 New Year's cards I still exchange every year, about a third are from friends I met in university.

You can meet people in all sorts of ways: in the same department or course, living in the same apartment building, working at the same part-time job, and so on. You might also meet people through club activities. Whether it's sports or cultural clubs, your club members will share the same hobbies. What's more, you'll likely live in roughly the same place, be around the same age and from the same era, and even have similar brain cortex capabilities. When you're troubled or in need, friends are there to listen and offer support. I encourage you to make such friends throughout your university life.

The third point is about graduate school.

You might think it's a bit premature since you just entered Faculty of Science and Engineering, but in today's Japanese industry, especially in engineering, job postings prioritize graduate MC graduates. As shown in the graduate school brochure we are receiving today, according to a Cabinet Office survey, if you continue working without changing jobs, men at age 25 and women at age 26 will see the wages reverse, widening the gap. Even considering the tuition costs at graduate school, graduate students have an advantage of about 50 million yen in lifetime wage income compared to undergraduate graduates. Tuition support systems such as tuition waivers by the government and universities are gradually becoming more enhanced, so rather than focusing solely on your immediate financial situation, we hope you will consider enrolling in our university's attractive graduate school.

The fourth thing I want to say, and this is the last one, is that I sincerely hope you will cultivate an interest in invisible things, or "concepts," throughout your university life.

Why did you decide to pursue a science and engineering degree at university? As you know, it's widely said that there's a growing trend of people moving away from science and developing a dislike for it. In the field of electrical and electronic engineering, which is my alma mater, graduates are in excellent employment prospects, not only in the electrical, electronic, and information fields, such as the semiconductor industry, but also in other sectors. However, it seems that our appeal to the general public, especially high school students, is somewhat lacking, and for the past few years, the application rate for courses in the second year has unfortunately not been very high. Compared to a generation ago when IT was booming, all the faculty members feel a sense of crisis. There are various opinions on why this has happened, but ironically, it seems that one of the reasons is the influence of the development and widespread presence of information devices such as flat-screen TVs, computers, and smartphones, which were the backbone of IT. These devices, such as high-definition televisions and smartphones, provide us with incredibly rich visual information, and the number of bits and the amount of information in the spatial and temporal domains—that is, the number of pixels and smooth motion—are increasing year by year. The human brain contains millions of optic nerves that process visual information from the eyes, which is said to be exactly two orders of magnitude more than the auditory nerves that process auditory information from the ears. It's the difference between one dimension and two dimensions. What happens when such a massive amount of visual data is continuously exposed to young people from adolescence to young adulthood, a period physiologically known as a sensitive period when brain nerves change the most? No one knows yet. Perhaps you are part of the sample generation that has received such a baptism.

I secretly worry that if we passively receive a large amount of visual information, we might become fixated on what we can see, and our interest in the invisible will not develop. Do you find it enjoyable to close your eyes and think about something on the train instead of using your smartphone or playing games? I believe that training such brain circuits is extremely important in university life. The origin of engineering lies in manufacturing, and the subject matter should be things that can be seen and touched, but the foundation of academics lies in the invisible things in the human brain, that is, "concepts." No one has ever directly seen the electrons that are dealt with in electronics engineering, and information is the concept itself. Mathematical formulas have meaning in the logic behind them. In contrast, subjects where the object is more important, such as robots and rockets, seem to be popular among prospective students, which I think is an example of the preference for visible things that young people today have.

In reality, the brain doesn't see what's in front of it; it only sees what it chooses to see. This is why we sometimes fail to notice things right in front of us when our attention is focused elsewhere. The brain also projects images from our memories onto the real world. This allows us to perceive the whole of an object even when only a part of it is visible, or to see a three-dimensional shape from a two-dimensional image. The brain can also forget vast amounts of information, abstracting only what is necessary and storing it as a concept. We perform these sophisticated information processing tasks in our minds every day without even being aware of it.

Considering these things, it seems very important to train the brain's processing circuits during university life to select and filter large amounts of image information, and to transform only the essence of that information into concepts.

Youth never repeats itself in life. I hope you make the most of that precious time, acquire lifelong treasures of knowledge and experience, and how to make use of them, so that when you look back on this period later, you will feel, "My time at Muroran Institute of Technology was wonderful."

This concludes my address to the new students, outlining the mindset and expectations they should have for their university life.

April 3, 2020

Muroran Institute of Technology President Mizushi Matsuda