[No. 102] Hiromu Takizawa

To all the high school students who are the main target audience for this column, you must be racking your brains over your future paths.

I'm the type of person who finds it tedious to worry about the future, so I tend to make choices rather casually and then work hard to justify them to the fullest. To put it negatively, you could say I'm a bit thoughtless and prone to winging it.

I hope that by sharing my journey from high school to my first year as a working professional, I can be of some help to those of you who are struggling with these decisions.

In high school, although I was in the science track, I felt I was weak at math. Therefore, based on the naive idea that I could get by without math in a biology-related field, the prevailing trend that "the age of bio is coming!" and a certain degree of interest in life sciences, I applied for "Gakumon 3," which offers a broad entry into the "Department of Biosciences and Informatics" that deals extensively with life sciences.

In my second year of undergraduate studies, I was successfully assigned to the Department of Biosciences and Informatics, which had been my goal since taking the entrance exams. While the various classes on life sciences and the hands-on life science experiments involving DNA extraction and molecular analysis were certainly stimulating, what captured my heart even more strongly was "programming." Whether you can get results from experiments using organisms and cells depends on various factors, such as intuition born from experience, external disturbances, and luck, on top of the prerequisite of precise and accurate experimental procedures. It also takes a lot of time to obtain experimental results. On the other hand, a program basically only does what you write, its quality can be reliably improved depending on the effort and time you put in, and you can usually get results instantly by running it. I think I found this incredibly appealing.

Partly because of this encounter, when it came time to choose a laboratory in my fourth year, I requested to be assigned to the "Systems Biology Laboratory," where research using programming was also possible. In the lab, I was able to achieve some decent results, such as presenting a poster at an international conference and publishing a paper in an academic journal. However, I now believe that what's important in student research is not "what results you produced," but "what process you went through to produce those results." In the professional world, people are often evaluated not by the process, but by the results they deliver. That is precisely why a laboratory is a precious "place of learning" for mastering the process of generating results on your own.

The laboratory was not just a place for learning; it was also a place to "have fun" to the fullest. We went on training camps (which were really just trips) together in the summer, celebrated the end of presentations by eating nothing but gyoza at Osho, and got strangely excited dressing up in cosplay (including cross-dressing). Although it's a fresh laboratory that has only been around for a few years, alumni reunions are held, and the connections among lab members are cherished.

I've lived my life with the mindset that most things will "somehow work out," but with the job market being so poor and having no experience with internships, clubs, or even part-time jobs, I didn't feel at all that finding a job would "somehow work out." However, as it turned out, I successfully secured a position at Sony. In interviews, you're asked various questions, including a self-introduction, but for R&D positions, there were many opportunities to present my university research. Even though I'm not good at self-promotion, explaining my research was a piece of cake. The research content itself wasn't directly related to Sony's business, but I believe I was evaluated on my approach to research and the lively way I presented it.

When I joined the company, I was assigned to an information systems-related research center, but I had the misfortune of my section's activities being suspended within one to two weeks, and a month later, the entire research center was slated for dissolution. I now belong to an organization that launches new businesses based on customer value, and there aren't many opportunities to directly apply the knowledge and skills I acquired at university in my work. However, for example, in the customer value verification stage, we follow a process almost identical to research: formulating a hypothesis about value, designing an experimental plan to test it, preparing based on that plan, conducting the experiment, and analyzing the results. Here too, I feel that the problem-finding and problem-solving approaches I cultivated through my university research are being put to good use. It's uncertain how long my current organization's activities will continue. Even so, I want to strive to successfully propose businesses that can deliver excitement to customers, and to ensure that the experience in such a challenging organization can be leveraged in other ways later on.

As we get older, moving from high school student to university student to working professional, I think in many cases the range of choices we can make for ourselves narrows, opportunities decrease, and we increasingly face situations where our direction, environment, and methods are dictated by external forces, or where decisions once made are easily overturned (though this is unavoidable in today's rapidly changing world...). In such circumstances, I hope that both you and I can cultivate the fundamental strength to live resiliently, always striving to make the best possible moves within the situations we find ourselves in.