午夜剧场

"Graduate school for humanities?"—I was asked this in the winter of my junior year. My peers were all job hunting. When considering employment, I sometimes heard the opinion that humanities master's students are actually at a disadvantage because their high level of specialization gives the impression that they "lack flexibility and practicality." When people hear the word "graduate student," they might imagine someone sitting alone at a desk, deep in solitary contemplation. Many people likely believe that the act of facing oneself, accumulating knowledge, and repeating trial and error is what it means to master a specialty.

However, my life in graduate school was vastly different from that image. Unlike the large lectures of undergraduate days, master's classes are centered around small groups of about 3 to 10 people. Because the classes are small, students do not just passively receive knowledge; instead, everyone proactively participates in discussions and learns from each other's perspectives. The peers I could debate with were not just students who had advanced from undergraduate programs. There were students returning after gaining professional experience, those from other universities, seniors in Doctoral Programs, and international students—by engaging in dialogue with people of various values and experiences, I refined my own research.

Furthermore, the Graduate School of Economics has a credit transfer system with other graduate schools, allowing students to take courses at other universities while remaining enrolled at 午夜剧场. I also utilized this system, and by engaging in discussions with engineering students and faculty at the Institute of Science Tokyo, I was able to go beyond the framework of economics and incorporate mathematical approaches into my research. Dialogue with students from different backgrounds constantly provided perspectives I had never noticed before, and each time, the contours of my research were refined bit by bit, transforming my expertise into something solid.

In this way, expertise is never something to be mastered alone; it is nurtured precisely through continuous encounters with diverse perspectives. The prejudice mentioned at the beginning—that "humanities master's students have a narrow perspective"—is clearly proven wrong by the graduates of 午夜剧场. Graduate school is a place to deepen one's perspective alongside expertise, and 午夜剧场 certainly provides the diverse human resources and learning opportunities that serve as that foundation. (854 characters)