GIS: A message from the Dean

Welcome to GIS.

Welcome to GIS and to the culture of a new age. Through the lens of an interdisciplinary curriculum, the Department of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies works to cultivate in its students the ability to identify and analyze issues and to seek solutions to the challenges an increasingly globalized world faces. It is in GIS that you will learn the skills needed to understand, discuss and debate regional, national and global events and issues. It is in GIS that you will develop the intellectual framework necessary to understand the world's cultures and peoples, its art and literature.

All GIS courses are conducted in English, the lingua franca of the twentieth-first century. It is not an exaggeration to say that cutting-edge advances in economics, science, culture, diplomacy, and politics for the most part have been made in English. The world of academics is no different. English is the language of learning and instruction in the EU and in many countries around the globe. Come immerse yourself in the English world of GIS. Acquire the logic of English, the ideas and knowledge of English-speaking cultures. And once you have absorbed its “universality", you then can look through that lens at your own country, its culture and society, and see it anew.

The future, I believe, will find many GIS students actively engaged in various fields of endeavor at home and abroad. Nonetheless, whatever the future holds for you, truly the support and understanding you show others will help to sustain both them and you in the journey ahead. GIS, a young department established in an age of expanding globalization, welcomes to its English-only classrooms returnees, students who have never been abroad, and international-born students. And in that way, the GIS community is creating its own tradition. Why not come be a part of it?

Mitsutoshi Somura
Dean of GIS