Looking Back: An "Eventful Life" | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2006.07.31
Perhaps my career in academia has been shaped by a series of fateful "encounters."
Encounter 1: Around the time I was finishing my master's program in the Faculty of Engineering, I received an offer for an assistant position at the Institute of Information Science, which was located in the basement of Building 7 on the Hiyoshi Campus at the time. I vividly remember feeling greatly honored, as this was an organization I was familiar with, having worked there as a program advisor (similar to a CNS consultant at SFC) since my undergraduate days, and it was an institute with many brilliant professors. However, that year, there were cuts to private school subsidies, and a freeze was put on hiring assistants across the entire Juku, so I lost the job before I could even start.
Encounter 2: In April of the following year, when I had all but given up, I received an acceptance letter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Furthermore, the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG) offered to hire me as a Research Assistant. It was the best possible offer. However, when I went to the Canadian Embassy in Akasaka to get my student visa, I was told that a visa could not be issued without an official letter of acceptance. Meanwhile, the University of Waterloo said they could not issue the official letter of acceptance until the visa was issued. It was a deadlock.
At the time, there was no e-mail or fax, so it took a very long time to resolve, but I somehow managed to get my visa before the summer. I was also fortunate enough to receive a travel grant from a certain foundation, and so I set off for Waterloo via New York. It was great that I could get on a charter flight for students who had been studying in the US and were returning to Japan, but the San Francisco-New York leg of the charter was canceled due to equipment issues, leaving me stuck in San Francisco. They rebooked us, a few at a time, onto regular commercial flights, and I managed to arrive in New York a few hours late. Two days later, I traveled overland by Greyhound and finally arrived in Waterloo.
Encounter 3: At CCNG, there were international students from various countries such as Brazil, Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam. Under the guidance of Professor Eric Manning, and with rigorous training from many CCNG members, senior colleagues, peers, and hackers, I successfully obtained my Ph.D. I went on a job interview tour that took me to several universities as well as places like the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center and the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory (now the Almaden Research Center) on the West Coast. Ultimately, I took a position at the Computer Science Department (CMU-CSD) at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, which was the mecca of distributed computing in the world at that time.
Looking back now, perhaps I wasn't seeking a university position so much as I was continually pursuing the world's most advanced research environments. Being able to work at CMU-CSD, which brought together many world-renowned researchers in the field of distributed systems, and to practice research and education as a member of a free, open, and vibrant research community has been an invaluable experience for me.
(Date posted: 2006/07/31)