Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 601. And today we're going to be doing something

a little bit different than usual. First, of course, last week you all heard episode 600.

I really enjoyed answering all of your questions, but one question I constantly get that I did

not think I could fit into that shorter episode is about academia.

Apparently, I have a lot of aspiring grad students or people who have thought about graduate school who listen to the show.

And many of you have asked me for advice, for thoughts on graduate school, and I'm always happy to give them.

But there's one challenge there, which is that I have been out of the

academic game for quite some time at this point, almost 10 years, as of next year, it will be 10

years. However, I'm very fortunate as well to have a listener and friend who was willing to come

on the show and share some more recent experience. So this week we have a special guest.

Would you like to introduce yourself, special guest?

This is incredibly surreal to me, because I've been on the receiving end of this podcast all

this time and it's crazy to be here now.

But my name is Charlotte.

I'm 22 this year, and I recently just graduated with first class honors from the University of Oxford,

where I read history. A little bit more about myself. I grew up in Hong Kong and I was there

up until the age of 14, after which my parents shipped me off to school in the UK. And we officially

made the move to London at 18. So very exciting, big city lives. And then I went to

Oxford when I was 19 after taking a gap year where I spent three years at St. Edmund Hall,

which was my undergrad college. I guess a little bit more about myself is that I actually didn't get into Oxford the first time

around when I applied, which is actually quite interesting talking about grad school from that

perspective because I have experienced quite a few kind of knockdowns in my academic career

...