Today was my first Rinkou class in this semester (Rinkou actually started last week, but I was too sick last friday to attend).

Rinkou was probably one of the only constants since my second coming to Japan. From my two master years all the way to the end of my PhD, every friday morning during class terms we were attending it.

In the Rinkou (which english translation is “seminary”), each student is supposed to present the results of his past 6 months of research to the rest of the department. For master students, that means 3 rounds of rinkou – the first one a “survey”, the two following terms “results”, and the last term they get a reprieve to work on their Thesis. For PhD students, it means 4 rounds of rinkou – two surveys and two results, alternating, with the last year without rinkou for thesis writing.

Every Friday we have three presentations (with parallel rooms in case there are too many students in the department to go through everyone in one term). Each student has 25 minutes to make his presentation, plus 5 minutes for discussion. We are supposed to write a brief report (1 or 2 paragraphs) about each presentation, and turn it in by the end of the class.

The idea has its merits. Supposedly, it increases the exchange of ideas between different laboratories in the same department – so that you can see research topics outside of your immediate field, and you get to get input from people who do not hear about your research everyday. It makes new students get used to preparing presentations, presenting, and answering questions. It also makes students get used to listening to “presentation and question” kinds of sessions. The “one big presentation every six months” may help some students organize their time.

In practice, there are quite a few shortfalls. Very few students really pay attention or make an effort to seriously discuss the works. This is not surprising, for most presenters don’t take the effort to make a presentation that is understandable for people from other fields – this is specially bad in my department, which has laboratories of very radically different fields, like artificial learning and semiconductor research. So the questions come mostly only from the professors, and the comments limit themselves to “thanks for your presentation”. To “remedy” this, the departments have come with a bunch of bad solutions like taking the student number of each student who makes a question, and requesting all students to have made at least one question by the end of each term, defining minimal limits for the size of each written contribution, etc. The more requirements they make, the more the students find a way around those requirements.

It is really a waste. Today, for coincidence, I have talked to two different sets of friends about how would it be possible to improve the rinkou so that we could take more from it. To be honest, our conversations didn’t go very far. In fact, last year there was this big meeting of the PhD students of my department, where one of the big topics of the agenda was improving rinkou. Many people gave some suggestions, but as far as I can see, nothing serious has changed.

The rinkou is actually a pretty big part of most courses’ coursework. In my case, it counts as 60% of all my credits. It seems that every department in engineering in Tokyo University has its own version of the Rinkou – each with a few differences, but most with the same basic characteristics and problems (as far as I can see from talking to friends in other departments). I have no idea if the Medical and Humanities schools also have something similar or not.