How far ahead should you prepare for grad school in Japan? 9 months from professor meetings to a Kyushu University acceptance

A student recently messaged me to ask:

"Could you share how students who actually got into grad school in Japan prepared?"

So today I want to share what one student did over 9 months, from preparing for professor meetings to finally receiving an acceptance letter, after being admitted in September 2026 to a master's program at Kyushu University's Graduate School.

The student applied to a graduate school that had been set up only recently and was relatively new.

Because it was new, there was very little online about past exams, past papers or experiences from earlier students.

So how do you prepare in a situation like that?

The first thing we did wasn't rushing to write interview answers. It was:

Reading the admissions guidelines (募集要項) carefully together.

We checked the eligibility requirements, the documents to submit, the exam format and the professors' research areas, and then decided what to prepare at each stage.

☃️ January | First online meeting with the preferred professor

The first goal wasn't the formal entrance exam. It was the professor meeting.

We started researching on researchmap, the university website and the professor's published papers.

Besides "What does this professor research?", it's even more important to think about:

"What do I want to research?"

"Why this professor?"

"How does my research topic relate to the professor's research?"

"Why do I want to join this graduate school?"

Then we practiced explaining those research ideas to the professor clearly in Japanese.

Many international students may already have passed N1 or N2, but suddenly explaining your field in Japanese is a completely different skill.

So before the first professor meeting, we spent a good amount of time organizing the research content and how to express it in Japanese.

☂️ June | Second professor meeting + preparing application documents

In June came the second professor meeting.

This time the student needed to explain their research direction more specifically than in the first meeting.

At the same time, we started preparing the application documents in earnest.

Since the graduate school was fairly new and there weren't many earlier students' experiences to go on, we went back to the most important source: the school's official admissions guidelines.

Which documents are required?

How does the school select applicants?

How developed should the research content be?

After checking these one by one, we planned the order of preparation.

This is something I've always emphasized when advising students:

Don't just search "○○ University acceptance experience."

Other people's experiences are worth referring to, but every year, every graduate school and every professor can be different.

For the most important information, always check the official admissions guidelines published by the university first.

🌻 July–August | Not memorizing answers, but getting "grilled" starting from the research proposal

In July we started interview practice properly.

First, I asked questions one at a time, based directly on the student's own research proposal.

For example:

"Please explain your undergraduate research in 1 minute."

"What is original about your research?"

"Please explain the prior research related to your study."

"What is your research hypothesis?"

At first, not every question could be answered right away.

When we ran into:

・Questions that took a long time to answer ・Answers whose logic wasn't clear enough ・Knowing what you want to say, but with unnatural Japanese grammar or phrasing

I don't just hand the student a "model answer."

Instead, I make those questions homework and ask the student to rethink them before the next lesson:

"What do I really want to say?"

"How can I put it so that a professor hearing about my research for the first time understands it?"

Then they answer again in the next lesson.

After they answer, I keep probing.

"Why?"

"Which one?"

"Specifically?"

"What if…?"

Like this, I keep following up with questions from different angles: Why, What, Which, How, If.

Then the parts of the answer that weren't complete go back home to be thought through.

Answer → get probed → find the gaps → rework it at home → answer again next time.

We went through this cycle over and over.

Because in a real grad school interview, the professor won't only ask the questions you prepared for.

More often, the professor listens to your answer and then follows up on one sentence in it.

So the goal of our practice wasn't to memorize 30 interview answers.

It was for the student to truly understand their own research, so that even if the professor suddenly asked:

"Why?"

"What's your basis for that?"

"What if the results differ from your hypothesis?"

they could organize their thoughts and answer calmly in Japanese.

That was the most important goal of our July interview training.

🍁 September | Formal entrance exam → Accepted! 🎉

Starting at the beginning of the year, the student worked through it step by step:

January | Preparing for the first professor meeting

　↓

June | Second professor meeting + application documents

　↓

July–August | 1-on-1 interview training

　↓

September | Formal entrance exam

In the end, they received an acceptance from Kyushu University's Graduate School! 🎉

About 9 months of preparation finally paid off.

No past papers, no earlier students' experiences, and you can still prepare

Through this student's experience, I want to tell you:

Even if the graduate school you want to apply to is newly established and you can hardly find any acceptance stories online, there's no need to panic.

Just go back to the basic order:

Admissions guidelines (募集要項)

→ Find a professor

→ researchmap and paper research

→ Professor meeting

→ Application documents

→ Interview

Prepare step by step.

Especially for international students, the result of a Japanese grad school exam isn't decided by "what you scored on the N1."

You also need to turn the subject knowledge you built up over four years of university, your research interests and the research you want to do in the future into Japanese a professor can understand.

That's also what I care about most:

Not teaching you a new field from scratch, but helping you turn "your own field" into Japanese you can use in a Japanese grad school.

If you've already chosen your target school and professor and the exam is only 1–2 months away, you don't have to keep memorizing interview answers on your own. 💪