Be well informed July 24, 2026
By A student (English Language and Literature, Lewis & Clark College) - abroad from 08/27/2025 to 05/17/2026 with
CET Japan
I learned to fight for myself and for others, because no one will do that for you. It is a valuable lesson to learn in life, but intensely unfortunate this is the way I had to learn it.
Personal Information
| How much international exposure did you have prior to this program? | None |
Review Your Program
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* Overall educational experience
Academic rigor, intensity, resources, etc. |
very intense, students are stressed and under an immense amount of pressure. A single bad head teacher ruined most of my experience. She failed to prepare us for tests, avoided being clear in any way about expectations, and as head teacher, her leadership resulted in her deciding to re-arrange our project timeline to unnecessarily memorize rough drafts of our speech scripts to impress visiting professors, as well as lack of communication causing one of the teachers to hand us the test for the following week, forcing them to re-write it in less than a week, upping the difficulty of the test. this is a test prep course, nothing more, nothing less. my time in class felt wasted, when I found more productivity in studying on my own instead of reading aloud in class. she also scheduled a speech competition, unrelated to any of our projects, in the middle of finals week, and was extremely resistant to admitting the event was only worth a day of participation points, because she was trying to get me to do it when it was not worth an ounce of effort. I studied for the final instead. |
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* Host Country Program Administration
On-site administration of your program |
Residential team were wonderful! 10/10 on their end, wonderful jobs, no complaints. the Academic team, mostly my teachers, repeatedly was unsupportive, refused to answer questions, and told me in their actions that my struggles and health issues were not important in the slightest. I was told outright, this was simply the way things are, and not given any help. when I needed help, two wonderful staff members offered their time to tutor me, because I was lagging behind due to health issues and needed help catching up. this was not a resource offered to me by the program, and not mentioned to me when i asked the academic administration for help. |
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* Housing:
How satisfied were you with your living arrangements? |
some issues with rowdy housemates but housing reacted well and quickly! I am however not satisfied with the landlord we had. My bed collapsed at midnight on me while I was there, and he did not fix it as asked by staff and myself. It's still broken actually. |
| * Food: |
great food, the school food is good, and there's good local options all around the school to choose to have lunch at. |
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* Social & Cultural Integration:
How integrated did you feel with the local culture? |
it is a little hard to get out of the 'CET Bubble' but when you do it's wonderful. I loved my host family that I got to stay with for a weekend, and the academic team was always planning outings that were fun and covered all our expenses! |
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* Health Care:
How well were health issues addressed during the program? |
I will say, when I did have to go, the residential team was wonderful. someone came with me to the doctor to interpret and make sure I knew what was going on, and they worked with whatever appointment time I could get. The reason for my rating is the academic side and attendance policy made it very hard to find time to go to the doctor, so many students did not go when they needed to. |
| * Safety: |
very safe, but you need to be aware of your surroundings. in one of my semesters we encountered a situation with a man stalking the female students, but he went away after some time and never confronted anyone. Japan definitely is leagues safer than America, but still a place with issues and social problems, so just be careful |
| If you could do it all over again would you choose the same program? |
No
my two stars are for the Residential team that were awesome from the start, caring, handled issues fast and well, and did all they could to support me. CET Japan's academic team endlessly chose to make decisions at the detriment of students, and when teachers made mistakes, it fell on the students to suffer the consequences. When things went wrong, no accountability was taken, and nothing was made right. |
Finances
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* Money: How easily were you able to live on a student's budget?
(1 = not very easy/$200+ on food & personal expenses/week, 2.5 = $100/week, 5 = very easily/minimal cost) |
If you grocery shop and don't eat out constantly, you can extremely easily have a very low food budget. my budget was 80k yen monthly and I regularly spent 40k a month on food, because i bought ingredients a lot and cooked. there are some good cheap places to eat, like the school cafeteria and a bento shop near the school that you can get a bento from for less than 800 yen. on top of this the program covers all expenses on outings (food, travel, for the overnight trip, lodging) of course not including souvenirs and other additional, optional expenses. it means you can go on a full outing planned by the program and not spend a dime to do it. |
| Not including program expenses, about how much money did you spend on food and other expenses each week? | 10-20k yen a week, or currently in usd 60-120 dollars |
| Do you have any general money-saving tips for future study abroad participants? | grocery shop, don't base your sense of price on what it is in the USA, base it on what you see in japan alone. The conbini is expensive. for what you'd pay to get a meal's worth of food from there, you can get fresh bento across the street. there's a grocery store right near the school as well, they'll always have lower prices than the conbini or restaurants. Saizeria is an Italian restaurant you can eat out at and get a drink, food, and dessert for under 1k yen. umeda has ramen from kamukura for under 1k yen, and other cheap foods in the umeda food hall. |
Language
| * Did your program have a foreign language component? | Yes |
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How much did the program encourage you to use the language?
0 = No encouragement, 5 = frequent encouragement to use the language |
we used it every day and had local housemates that you could usually only communicate with in Japanese |
| How would you rate your language skills at the beginning of the program? | Beginner |
| How would you rate your language skills at the end of the program? | Advanced |
| What was the highest level language course you had completed prior to departure? | 100 level |
| How many hours per day did you use the language? | 10+ |
Other Program Information
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* Where did you live?
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* Who did you live with?
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* Who did you take classes with?
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| About how many local friends did you make that you will likely keep in touch with? |
A Look Back
| * What did you like most about the program? |
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| * What could be improved? |
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| * What do you know now that you wish you knew before going on this program? | I wish I knew that this program has a very specific target audience, and if you are not great at memorization, intensely great at it, you will not do well. you have to be good at learning Japanese to have a wonderful time on this program, and if you are not, do not come. your experience will be vastly different based on the teacher you have. you could have a head teacher that is nice, and makes tests based on what you learned, and give you focus on what to study for the test. I had the pleasure of having that for a few months of this program, and it was great. you could also have a head teacher that refuses to divulge any advice or direction for how to study and prepare for tests like it's a state secret, leaving you with no idea what the test will be like, and get stress tested in a way that makes your entire class do very poorly in the oral exams. in other words, your experience solely hinges on your head teacher. |
Reasons For Studying Abroad
| To help future students find programs attended by like-minded individuals, please choose the profile that most closely represents you. |
The Academic or LinguistYou went abroad with specific academic goals in mind; the program credentials and rigor of your coursework abroad were very important to you. You had a great time abroad, but never lost sight of your studies and (if applicable) were diligent with your foreign language study. Good for you! |
