Master’s Graduation in Japan — Quiet, Simple, and a Gift I Didn’t Expect

March 25, 2022. My Master’s graduation day at University of Tsukuba.

No procession. No cheering crowds. No family waiting outside with flowers. Just a brief ceremony at the faculty level — names called one by one, certificates handed over, done.

Very different from my undergraduate graduation at ITB in October 2018, which felt far more lively and celebratory.

A Graduation I Half-Missed

Truthfully, I didn’t even attend the main graduation ceremony that day.

I was still finishing up lab experiments in the morning. So I only showed up in the afternoon — picked up my certificate, took a few photos for documentation, and went back to normal life.

It might sound underwhelming for what should have been a significant milestone. But that was the honest reality of it.

Part of the reason the atmosphere felt muted was the lingering effects of the pandemic — while restrictions were no longer as strict as in previous years, large gatherings still hadn’t fully returned to normal. It was a quiet graduation across the board, not just for me.

A Gift from My Supervisor

After collecting my certificate, I went to the lab to take photos with my supervisor.

To my surprise, he had prepared a graduation gift.

It was a genuinely unique one — very much in the spirit of research: a special ice cream spoon made from a material with high thermal conductivity. When you hold the spoon, the heat from your palm transfers directly to the tip — making a normally rock-hard single-serving ice cream cup much easier to scoop.

For most people, that might sound like a quirky novelty. But for me — someone who had spent two years researching heat transfer and photothermal heating — it was deeply personal.

He had chosen something that mapped directly onto the science I’d been doing. That meant more than any expensive gift could have.

Relieved — For Exactly One Day

That day I felt genuine relief. Two years of work, done. A weight lifted.

But the relief lasted exactly one day.

Because the next morning, reality was already waiting:

April 1, 2022 — Day one of my doctoral program.

Along with it came a target that wasn’t small: publish three peer-reviewed journal papers in three years. Effectively one paper per year, every year, without a break.

A new journey — no less challenging than what came before.

Looking Back on Two Years

If I had to summarize my Master’s degree at University of Tsukuba in one sentence:

It wasn’t a smooth road — and that’s exactly what made it worthwhile.

From knowing nothing about how a Japanese research lab works, to studying through a global pandemic, to nearly not continuing to PhD, to accidentally discovering the research technique that would define my entire doctoral thesis — all of that happened in two years.

The Master’s chapter is closed. The PhD chapter was just beginning.