Dr. Van Meter, I want to come study with you!

Fantastic! I am always interested in having good students (where my definition of "good" is "smart, hard working, and pleasant to work with"). Please read this page before contacting me; you will find the answers to many of your questions either here or by following the links.

Disclaimer: Nothing on this page should be considered authoritative; the material is here to help, but may be out of date, misinterpreted, or even outright wrong, as I am not an expert on the admissions process. Moreover, no communications with me should be considered official, as I do not have the power to make any pronouncements for the university in any interesting capacity.

First off, I assume you're interested in graduate school or postdoctoral study; if you are an undergraduate, you should consider joining Aqua, All-IP, Arch, or another of the RG KGs. Most of the rest of this page assumes you are interested in getting a Ph.D. with me. Keep in mind that this will make you part of the Jun Murai Internet Research Lab, which is an excellent place to be. Our lab is filled with world-class experts on a variety of topics, and the faculty are very supportive of a wide range of research interests. Supervision of Murai Lab students is shared among all faculty in the lab, sometimes with additional support from faculty from other Keio campuses or outside of Keio.

University/Keio SFC Basics

If you already live in Japan, you are probably aware of the basic way in which a Japanese university operates. If you are not, here are a few basic facts:

• The system is similar in some ways to the American system. A bachelor's degree is (supposed to be) four years, a master's two, and a Ph.D. three more (many of our students take longer than three years, for a variety of reasons, but many scholarships for overseas students will pay for only three).
• If you are an undergraduate considering getting a Ph.D. with me, the Japanese system generally requires you to first acquire a master's degree, so you should begin by applying for the master's program. MEXT scholarships (see below) are available for master's students.
• The school year starts in April, but we also admit students to start in September.
• Ph.D. students do not generally take classes for credit; you are assumed to be ready to conduct research. Auditing of classes is quite common, however, and as you are coming from outside SFC, I encourage it as a way to learn about the faculty and research here, as well as to fill in any gaps in your background.
• Master's students should expect to do a serious dissertation.
• You're reading this page in English; you must read English well enough to get through hundreds of pages of technical text in a year. You will be expected to write research papers in either Japanese or English, and will have to give at least one international conference presentation (which, in general, means English). If you speak neither Japanese nor English well, your life will be harder here. However, I am quite used to dealing with people whose native language is not English. It will be an additional hurdle, but not a deciding factor in your success.

Funding

At the moment, I have only extremely limited access to funding for new students. If you are coming from outside Japan, in general, you will need to secure funding for at least your first year from outside; many of our Ph.D. students are self-funded for at least part of their education. Here are a few links.

• JASSO keeps a good page on studying in Japan. Overall, this might be the best place to start, as it has links to MEXT and other organizations.
• The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (called MEXT; the Japanese name is 文部科学省, Monbukagakusho or Monkasho) supports some students to come to Japan for study. The Monbukagakusho scholarships are competitive and quite presitigious. How competitive depends on the country you are coming from, and I am told that the application processes and due dates vary by country, but are sometimes as much as two years in advance of when you would start your studies. You should begin by checking with the Japanese embassy in your country as well as the links below. I believe much (all?) of the paperwork for this is submitted through the university (Keio, in this case), so it is important to follow the links to Keio below.
• There is even a specific list of Keio scholarships in the MEXT website. (n.b.: This page is mostly focused on undergraduates.)
• The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science also supports Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars.
• Keio's own International Center keeps a list of scholarships and a separate news page, which is a good place to start. One good one is the Design the Future Award for international students.
• Our campus has its own International Office, focused primarily on undergraduates but with a lot of good information about the campus, faculty and environs. As you get closer to coming, the information in the Handbook for SFC International Students will be invaluable. The Mita IC also has a "Life at Keio" page that is helpful.
• Of course, you should familiarize yourself with our graduate school, especially the Admissions page.

Once you are here, funding may become a little easier to find for subsequent years. The Keio offices have some information on sources, such as private foundations, that support students that are already here.

Getting Accepted

Contacting me to express interest in coming to SFC to study with me is a good place to start, as graduate admissions are done partially based on a research plan developed for study with a particular professor, and approved by him/her. However, I know nothing else about admissions rules -- dates, fees, forms, testing, visas, etc. Please see the Graduate School of Media and Governance web pages for more information about these topics. (n.b.: Don't worry about the name of the graduate school. I mentor students in quantum information, and other faculty members mentor in bioinformatics; our school as a whole is quite broad and interdisciplinary in its approach.)

You and Me

Important notice: I do not discriminate against anyone due to age, race, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, religion, political persuasion, disability, height, weight, astrological sign (Chinese or Western), blood type, or favorite baseball or basketball team.

I do consider the adviser/advisee relationship to be a mentoring relationship with a personal component as well as a professional one. Our lab has a strong and mostly informal social life, and you can look forward to constant interaction with other students and faculty, on both social and technical topics.

Quantum Computing

I get a fair number of queries from people interested in pursuing quantum computing. Wonderful! It's a fascinating topic, and will be critical in the years to come. However, it is a very interdisciplinary topic, and starting from scratch means that you have a long ways to go. Before starting a Ph.D. program, you should already have a reasonably solid background in at least one of the following:

• Mathematics: group theory, probability, linear algebra
• Physics: elementary quantum mechanics, optics, semiconductors, thermodynamics and entropy
• Computer science: computational complexity, Boolean logic, error correction, data structures, algorithms, automata, etc.

In addition, because I am a computer systems person and am interested in quantum computer architecture and distributed quantum computation, the following are helpful:

• The ability to program is fundamental. You should be able to program in Mathematica, Matlab/Octave, Java/C++/C, or at least Python or Ruby.
• Compilers
• Computer architecture
• Networking
• Queueing theory
• Operating systems
• Computer arithmetic

In fact, I consider that list to be pretty fundamental to a well-rounded education in computer systems, so it's useful regardless of your topic.

What Next?

Goal: Your goal is to convince me that I should support your application to our graduate school. As we go through the process, I may ask for reference letters from faculty at your current (or last) institution, and I will ask for a telephone interview as the last step before agreeing to support your application. You need to convince me that you have a reasonable chance of completing a Ph.D. under me in the expected time frame, which means showing me the following:

• that you are reasonably intelligent,
• that you are organized and hard working,
• that you have a strong enough background in at least some of the areas above that we're not starting from zero,
• that you can communicate your ideas effectively, and
• that your interests and abilities overlap enough with mine that I can mentor you effectively.

To achieve that goal, do the following:

• Figure out what you want to do:
  1. master's or Ph.D.,
  2. what general topic you intend to study, and
  3. when you hope to start (after you look at the dates below).
  Send me this information, along with the information below.
• Check into dates, deadlines, forms, etc. You will have to drive the overall application process, not me.
• Start the process of finding funding for at least your first year. I am of very limited help here.
• Send me your c.v. or transcript, with the courses you have taken. These should be by name, at least, not course number, or, better yet, a one sentence to one paragraph long description. If you have taken computing classes and can map them to the topics in the ACM curriculum recommendations, that would be ideal.
• Send me a research plan. It should be about three pages, to start with (unformatted email is okay to begin with, as we will likely go back and forth on this). I demand five things in a research plan from my students, you might as well get used to it:
  1. Problem definition: what are you trying to do, and why? How will the world be a better place if you succeed?
  2. Related research: who else has attacked the same problem? Did they succeed or fail? What are the shortcomings of their solutions?
  3. The key idea: this is where everyone starts.
  4. Evaluation: how will you evaluate whether or not it works?
  5. Schedule: this shows me that you are organized, can manage yourself and your research, and that you have scoped the problem correctly (it is neither too large nor too small).
  Of course your first plan won't be very complete or in depth, but I need to have some idea of what you want to do and whether or not to believe that you are capable of actually doing it.

The plan I ask you to write above is not the final word on what your thesis topic will be, but it gives me a lot of insight into how you work. I do have a long list of unsolved research problems, but I do not have time to share them with every possible candidate. This plan is your chance to show creativity and initiative, but you should assume it will change, perhaps radically, later.

Contacting Me

Rules for contacting me:

• Read this page first! (Duh!)
• If you send me documents, send them to me in PDF, PostScript, or plain text, in English or in Japanese. I do not accept documents in Microsoft Word format.
• I am generally good about replying to email, but I get enormous amounts of it. If I have not responded to you within a few days, feel free to resend your mail; I do not consider that rude, as I often miss mail in the flood. Do consider whether your mail looks like spam. Subject lines such as "Please reply" or "I am interested in you" likely are deleted without being read. Try something more substantive, such as "graduate study in quantum computing" (or whatever your topic of interest is).