Promotion of Graduate Students Internship Project that Specialize in Practical Education for Training Professionals with Advanced Specialities by MEXT
The advanced internship program for graduate students by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)
- Green steel creation program-
The advanced internship program for graduate students by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) entrusts academic and industrial entities to create and implement together good long term internship programs for graduate students using practical environments in businesses and workplaces. This Program has been in place from 2005 to 2010.
Conventional internships have focused on forming job consciousness through work experience in enterprises. On the other hand, this Program aims at constructing a system for developing human resources by which academic and industrial entities can cooperate with each other in a constructive manner and which fosters highly educated experts who understand various problems in society and approaches in the industry, and have an interest in society, through effective management of joint research.
Green Steel Creation Program
This advanced internship project based on the Green Steel Creation Program provided by the Department of Metallurgy, Materials Science, and Materials Processing, Tohoku University, is one of the 20 programs selected from among 55 applications for the Program of MEXT in 2005.
Different from conventional internship programs that focus on students' job experience in enterprises, the students are dispatched to steel companies where they practice creating green materials, i.e., environmentally friendly steel materials, from a perspective of environment, energy and resources. This education program aims at helping students compare their research subjects with the real world, make a comprehensive judgment on them in terms of the environmental contribution and public benefits, and finally propose and create a new technological system or field, or a new value system, beneficial to society.
Green Steel
In 2005, the Department of Metallurgy, Materials Science, and Materials Processing, Tohoku University, established the Advanced Research and Education Center for Steel (ARECS) whose purpose is to research and promote steel materials as totally new materials (i.e., Green steels). This is a key to the creation of a society with a low environmental load, and production processes to minimize the environmental load because of the ease of recycling, reduced alloy elements, longer service life, reduced carbon emissions and wastes, etc., while fully improving the characteristics and functions. To create green steels, it is necessary not just to stick to research areas only covering iron but to take unconventional approaches to construct new concepts or incorporate different areas, beyond traditional technologies and value systems. This is why it is important to continuously foster human resources educated with this perspective. Green steels should not be just a concept, but should be put into production as the end result. In developing such steels, production processes should be contemplated. It is however difficult for universities to research green steels by themselves, and it is, then, critically important for them to collaborate and cooperate with, and be helped by enterprises. Under these circumstances, sending students who engage in research to create green steels to enterprises meets the intended purpose of this Project. For enterprises, it is difficult to sustain a long term R & D project on green steels that is very unlikely to yield short term benefits, even if they recognize the necessity of green steels. In that respect, cooperation with universities in that field would be quite advantageous.