What sort of department is the Department of Electrical Engineering and Bioscience?

You can study a wide range of fields during your first and second years, and when you join a laboratory in the fall of your third year, you can start studying a specialty. As I expected, I studied the circuits of electrical systems, electrical systems programming, and the ecology of organisms in biological systems, and then was able to decide on my own specialty. So I would like to recommend a similar approach to people who have not yet decided on a specialty.
However, in this department, while there are some (like myself) who enter without deciding on a specialty, there are others who do. I personally know of people who knew before entering the department that their interest in biological systems would be in DNA, or that their interest in electrical systems was focused on the study of smart grids.

So studies are not only broad in scope, but deeply probing?

You could say that. One of the required biological system experiments involves dissecting a mouse. I wasn’t expecting that, and it was a bit of a challenge. (Laughs)

What sort of research interests you now?

At Professor Shinji Wakao’s laboratory, I am involved with research involving operation of smart grids, which I mentioned previously. While wind and solar power are inexhaustible forms of renewable energy which have a low environmental impact, they are unstable because their power generating capacity varies according to the weather. A smart grid is a collection of devices that make it possible to efficiently utilize such renewable forms of energy in combination with conventional energy sources.
Among these, I am working on means of predicting insolation. This involves making simulations that are based on past data regarding temperature, weather, insolation, and so forth. Taking this approach, you can grasp overall trends, but it is hard to predict short-term fluctuations.

How do you like being in Waseda?

For better or worse, the student body includes all sorts of people, and there are lots of opportunities to interact with them. You can meet students from other campuses through club activities, and in class you can meet students from other departments of the Faculty of Science and Engineering. On the other hand, there are students who do not come to class, but spend all their time travelling overseas, working as volunteers, or playing in the band.
Of course, the school is fully equipped with research facilities and facilities for study abroad and language learning. For someone who is good at managing their own time, there are lots of things that you can do at this school.