Celebrating ƽ’s First Japanese Majors
On May 19, 2025, ƽ graduated its first cohort of Japanese majors. This group of students started learning Japanese in fall 2021, ƽ’s first semester back to in-person learning after a year and a half of online learning.
Embracing the fully in-person experience after their high school senior year online, the students bonded as a community of Japanese learners. Three of them did a full-year off-campus study in Japan, overcoming their tight academic schedules as double-majors in biology, computer science, and sociology. Two of them were also devoted athletes in track and field and football.
Melanie Oden ’25 double-majored in sociology and Japanese and saw her two majors come together in her final year at ƽ, culminating in her Mellon-Mayes project, which critiqued the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals through the lens of Black Panther practices. Oden drew from her year-long study abroad experience in Tokyo, as well as the course-embedded travel in JPN 398: SDGs in Japan, to inform her study. Oden wrote, “the two [majors] merged wonderfully together … I can ask questions in sociology pertaining to Japan and I can learn about social concepts in Japan that then worked to further my understanding of my place in this world,” and emphasized the benefit of learning a non-Western language, which “provided other perspectives, [introduced] a different culture, and prompted my curiosity.”
The Japanese major was established in 2023, over two decades after Japanese language courses were first offered in 2000–01 on a trial basis. Since then, the College has gradually increased its commitment to the program to respond to the steady student demands for the program, which persisted through the global financial crisis and the pandemic. This is the first new major to be established at ƽ after gender, women, and sexuality studies became a major in 2009.