Already before you leave for Japan, you will be asked to
fill in a form called Learning Agreement. For us Master’s students, we have to
fill in that form courses worth 24 credits. In the case of Sophia University, the
first complication is that at Sophia the credits are not counted the same way
as at Aalto: 8 credits at Aalto equals 4 credits at Sophia. So, you will need
to pick three courses (most of the courses available for exchange students seem
to be 4cr) to have enough studies for your exchange. Personally, I highly
recommend taking a course in Japanese language as one (because you really need the language to survive in Japan), leaving you able to pick
two courses more related to your major at Aalto.
This is where you can find the online syllabus of Sophia
University:
The syllabus includes all the study programmes, which is a LOT
of courses, so you might want to narrow it down a little bit. Unfortunately, it
was not possible to only choose the courses that are taught in English, so we
could not filter it any better than by the programmes that are taught at the Yotsuya
campus, the only campus where we exchange students could take studies.
The Master’s Programmes in Global Studies, Economics and
Global Environmental Studies all include courses that are held in English and
are possible for us to study (if your background is adequate). The syllabus
search engine did cause some serious frustration with the course selection, as
most course titles that appear in the search results are in English, yet when
you clicked the title to see the details of the course you would most often
find only Japanese text, meaning that actually the course is only for those
with native-level Japanese. Hopefully they will make some changes here sometime
soon.
About the Japanese language course, I wish I had known back
then that in the beginning of each semester, Sophia will organize a language
course placement test that will determine the level of your language studies
and therefore the very specific course that you will be placed in. There are so
many different language study groups and all the course codes, but actually you
don’t have to worry about it at all – the school will find you a suitable group
based on the results of your test.
If you don’t have any prior knowledge of Japanese language,
or if you have but still wish to start studying from the very basics (it starts
with learning hiragana and katakana), then just skip the language test and you
will be placed in one of those beginners’ groups.
At Sophia, I tried to find courses related to my major, but I
could not find any that would directly be about corporate communication.
Therefore, I chose courses Corporate Finance and Corporate Strategy, since this
was the perfect chance to study other interesting subjects outside my own
degree programme. The content of the strategy course was not unfamiliar to me,
but studying it now for a period of over four months certainly increased my
understanding of the topic and gave a far more concrete idea of the strategy
work at corporations.
I can recommend the strategy course to everyone who has some
background in strategy, as well as I can recommend the finance class to
everyone who wants to learn about the portfolio theory and some of the basic
principles of corporate finance.
Hopefully you find this information helpful, I know it would've decreased my stress level before the exchange for sure!
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