MEXT research scholarship interview experience

I gave some MEXT interview tips in a previous post. Here I just share my experience at the UK embassy and the questions I was asked, but for more general advice I suggest reading that post.

The interviewers were two Japanese men. They were very nice and didn't seem critical of anything in my application. I believe one was from the embassy and the other was a professor of science unrelated to my field. Here are the main questions they asked, not in order.

-Introduce yourself

-Please explain the main aim of your research, we're not physicists…

-Why do you need to use this specific detector in Japan to achieve this?

-Why are you particularly interested in this area of physics?

[A few more small questions about the research, they really weren't experts so couldn't pick holes in it]

-What do you know about living in Japan?

-There are very few women in this field, why do you think that is? How will you deal with that? [I'm not really sure what they were trying to get at here… the situation is the same in Europe. And I thought it might be a bad idea to get into explaining gender discrimination to two middle-aged Japanese men, so I just said something about needing more role models.]

-The experiment is in the middle of nowhere, if you have to go there for a longer time would you cope?
[They didn't press me much on living in Japan but I have already lived in 5 different countries...]

-I see you said your speaking is "good", can you do your self-intro again in Japanese please?

-You said your reading is "excellent", can you read information about physics in Japanese?
[Some more questions about how I've been studying Japanese and why]

-I see you finished school one year early, why is that?

-What do you intend to do after you finish studying in Japan, will you return to the UK?

...And then a couple of random questions about my hobbies and educational background that were vague and more them remarking on things I'd written on the application than actual questions.

The only problem I had was that the interviewers had quite strong Japanese accents and I missed a couple of things they said e.g. near the beginning when they were introducing themselves. Generally it was not an unpleasant experience.


I had submitted my N2 scores (which were quite high) with my application, so I was not that concerned about the Japanese test. They also stressed that your level of Japanese knowledge shouldn't affect your chances of success, but I do believe it is still an advantage because it reassures them that you will be able to survive living in Japan. Most of the questions were JLPT style although there were a few where you had to write kanji by hand.

A couple of people seemed to write virtually nothing on the Japanese test. I was certainly the last person to leave, since I guess the others gave up earlier... or were so good they finished everything really quickly lol.

They also made us do the English test which seemed more than faintly ridiculous. It was sort of interesting to see what poor non-natives have to go through since there were a fair few dodgy questions that native speakers would hesitate over (does one lay down or lie down on a sofa? depends where you're from probably).

MEXT research scholarship advice, part 2: The application itself

Intro
Part 1

In this post:

-University recommendation

-Research plan

-Other application documents

-Language tests

-Interview at the embassy