It’s 14th July 2018, and as I look out of the cab’s window to see the bustling traffic of Mumbai. I find it hard to digest, that I wouldn’t be nagging about the Japanese food anymore or wouldn’t be cycling through the lush green driveways to the University or watching endless youtube cooking tutorials trying my hand at cooking. At such instances one realises how fast time passes, it feels like yesterday, the day I arrived to land of rising sun, the paradise of anime and breathtaking technology, Japan. It was a journey that taught me innumerable things.

December

I came to know about the summer internship in UTokyo, sometime around december, and after reading through the website, I decided that I should give it a shot. After filling in the details and submitting the necessary documents came in the part of LOR submission which I procrastinated about. With everything done and just the LORs remaining I was a bit laid back considering the deadline and was working on my inter-iit project that time, where the work load was increasing at a fast rate. Remembering about it only after the new year and having to go through a near miss submission form.

April

I received my visa in three days and just had to submit all the documents sent by the University with a few essentials from my side.

June

View of the country from the flight

The first thing that you notice as soon as your enter Japan is the their love for technology from toilets to billboards, from side walks to traffic lights, their have innovations in the simplest of the simple things. The Mumbai rains had caused a 3.5-hour delay my flight and we missed the bus that directly stops near the accommodation, which meant taking 3-4 trains as the hotel was about 80kms away from the airport. The initial week was all filled with orientations and visits organised by the university which involved getting to know about the university, the work being done their, understanding about the japanese culture and interacting with the fellow students who were selected in the program.

Tokyo Palace

From the subsequent week, I began with my project. During that week I had to learn about computational biology and problems in the field, getting the knack about the terminologies, understanding about the research that is happening in the area and also beginning my first task which was a problem in data visualization. I had to create a visualization of the transposons, which are the jumping genes and subsequently find the ones that are derived from it and thus, create a chain of such transposons. This structure would resemble that of a tree design and would help to easily locate and various transposons from the gene and thus, help in understanding their structure. I could complete my task quite early and thus, was given another problem to work upon. The second problem was creating a classifier for of the transposons, that is a classifier that could differentiate between whether a given part of gene is a transposon or not.

July

I completed my second task in the first week of July which also included a fun trip to kamakura organised by the University and the we also watch a traditional japanese play. The final week included wrapping up all the work and presenting it to all the professors and other summer interns. The last day was the one concluded with two farewell parties, one from the University and another one from the lab which had Indian food too, specially prepared for me!

A Picture with the Lab Members