MEXT Scholarship Research Plan: General Notes on Section Six

sesungguhnya realiti itu tidak indah;

It's MARCH everybody! The month of Spring and beautiful sakuras, and also the month for the MEXT Academic Year 2020 Scholarship Application to open (Jeng Jeng JENG). This post is the second part in my series to share my experience (and also that of my partner) in our previous application process. You can read the first part here to get some background information on the scholarship. In this post, we will moving to the next key part of the application, which is the research plan. 

Research Plan.

I think its important to mention that there are different types of research plans, differing according to project, universities, etc. Some are fairly intricate, and need a tonne of detail, while others like the MEXT Research Plan, are very simple clean, and straight to the point. However, this can also be a problem to some as applicants are then faced with ambiguity.

The embassy will provide guidelines on how to fill out the application form when it comes to the basic information, history of education and more. However, the only section that they will not provide any guides to will be the main body of the application, which is Section Number 6 and 7. The part that will be your Research Plan in Japan. They even clarify in the guidelines that there will be no guides in answering these two sections, thus giving the freedom to applicants to be as creative as they want to be.

Here I'll be briefly sharing what me and my fiance had written in our respective applications so that you can have an idea of how to write your own. Of course as always, it is important to remember that this can differ greatly according to field, so in our case, we are both in the Social Sciences.

Notes on Section 6

As this is a postgraduate application, the reviewer will need to have a background on your first degree. You will need to submit your academic transcript along with the application, thus re-writing the list of subjects in Section 6 will thus be redundant. The main idea is to craft a paragraph on what you have learnt through those subjects and how it is connected, and will be connected to your future research theme in Japan. 

Let's take for example the list of subjects I took. This included Japanese Language Phonetics, Introduction to Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication to name a few. From those subjects, this was the paragraph I wrote for my application:

Example from Academic Year 2017 Application

General Reminders

1. You do not need to write about ALL the subjects that you have taken previously. Pick and choose the ones that have the most relation to your future research theme as reviewers will want to see the flow of thought, and the original development of the research plan. 

2. Reviewers will not necessarily be from your field, so it is important to remember to use layman terms where possible in order for them to easily understand what you want to get across. I had to constantly remind my partner to insert easy to understand definitions for his research theme which involved more complicated terms. In his example below, he even inserted his graduation thesis and a one liner on his findings. 

Example from Academic Year 2018 Application

My lecturer once told me that,

"The goal of a research plan in any kind of application is for anyone who reads it, regardless of their background to be able understand in general what the research is all about."

 I suggest having someone from another field have a read before you proceed with your application. Without saying this can also greatly help you with typos and minor errors. Another thing to note is if you look at the amount of space that they provide for Section 6, it is easy to figure out that they want something short and precise. As writers would often say,

"Keep It Short Simple"

That's all for Section 6. I'll be following up with Section 7 in another post because if not this will end up being too long. Hope this will be able to help out anyone who is interested in applying for Academic Year 2020!

You can find more information in the useful links below :)

till then, cheerio.

Japan Embassy in Malaysia

Step-by-Step MEXT Scholarship Application