Completion Ceremony

Final exam week is over, and so the spring semester of the Asian Studies Program has ended. A completion ceremony was held today, which resembled the opening ceremony last year. It was like a graduation ceremony.

Though many students do only one semester here at KGU, either spring or fall, the ceremonies treat the fall semester plus the spring semester as one academic year (starting in the fall, like the American system). Meaning that students who are only here for the fall semester experience an opening ceremony but not a closing ceremony (they don't receive fancy certificates), and people who are only here for the spring semester and not the fall have a closing ceremony and no opening ceremony.

There were speeches, a picture slideshow accompanied by a KGU marching band, and the handing out of our certificates. Every exchange student had an assigned seat: we were to sit alphabetically by last name because that's the order we would each be called up in to go on stage and receive our completion certificate.

A farewell luncheon was held afterward

The first two columns are the names of countries, in English and Japanese, and the third column lists the number of universities KGU has students from in that country while the fourth column lists the total number of people from those countries. This is data from the fall 2013 semester and the spring 2014 semester. Though there were 610 students who studied abroad here in total this year, per semester there are only roughly 300+ students.

Again, the number of people from each country does not necessarily indicate nationality. For example, I know someone from Norway who attends a university in the U.K. so she's counted towards the U.K.'s number, not Norway's.

My certificate

Today was fun. I saw a lot of people and we took many pictures. I met some people for the last time today, and I had to say goodbye to one of my friends. I have one week left in Japan.