The recipient of the UCLA Terasaki Center's second ever University of Tokyo Undergraduate Scholarship recently participated in the 2019 University of Tokyo Summer Internship Program. Miss Ivy Li, a third-year Sociology student at UCLA, spent over one month interning in the University of Tokyo's International Studies Department, and concluded her program with a presentation on "Evolutionary Selection of Thresholds for Group Consensus through Honey Bee Swarms."

Below, Miss Ivy Li writes about her experiences in Japan and encourages other undergraduate students to consider the program for the 2020 year. If you are interested in applying, please contact us at japancenter@international.ucla.edu.

Overall it was a great 6 weeks that gave me an opportunity to experience the Japanese Culture while doing intense researches at such a high-level institution. Throughout the six weeks, I worked closely with my lab partner Haruki Kageyama under Horita Laboratory with Professor Horita on the topic of "Investigation of individual thresholds and group decision making through honey bees". I also presented a presentation by the end of the program.

Just like me, other students who were also part of this program all did research on a variety of science topics with different Professors and under different Laboratories. Some are even planning on co-authoring with Phd students on their research projects.

In terms of experiencing Japanese culture, the program organized trips to visit local museums and historical areas, classes for learning Japanese and Japanese calligraphy, as well as watching Kabuki plays.

However, apart from the research and Japanese culture experience, the part of which I thought is equally valuable is the people I met. I met many other gifted and passionate students, a lot of friendly and super smart phd students, and my lovely Professor. I even did a night-hike up to the top of Mt. Fuji to see the sunrise with Professor Takase, who built the first tokamak in Japan.

There were a lot of great memories created in the past six weeks. I am really grateful for this experience! Especially thank you and your office for helping out so much throughout the application process! This experience definitely would not have been this smooth without your help. Please let me know how I could help in the future, and I truly think more people could be benefiting through this program too!

Image provided by Ivy Li