Report of the summer program
My name is sathirakul korbboon, a third-year chemical engineering student at the University of Tokyo. I sincerely appreciate thesupport of the Tazaki foundation for funding my summer short-term program study at the university college London. In thisreport, I will share my experience with the teaching method, study content, and social life at one of the top 10 globaluniversities.
In this summer school program, I took the Economics for Sustainability: Climate Change and Social Inequalities module. The
instructor of this course is currently working as a policy officer and analyst at the European Commission. The course content
focuses on applying pluralism economic thinking to understand two main complex sustainability problems: social inequality andglobal warming and its relationship. This three-week content was very well organized and easy to understand, even if I comefrom an engineering background. In the first week, the course mainly deals with the facts and narratives to illustrate theknowledge of climate change, inequalities, and many aspects of the sustainability problem. Then, in the second week, thecourse focused on teaching economy-environment-social interactions from different schools of economics thinking. After
dealing with the content of sustainability problems in many aspects and the economic thinking tools, in the last week,
instructors thought about how to apply these tools to solve such a complex problem by providing real study policy cases such as
low-carbon just transition.
The teaching method is mainly based on the lecture and reading material. We have only three and a half of lectures almost
every day to focus on the general concept of each lecture and some free time to ask an instructor about the reading material.
Since this course covered a wide range of content and it was hard to teach everything within the classroom time, we wererequired to read a lot of reading material daily to catch up with the classroom lecture. The reading material includes many wellknown books that introduce each school of an economic concept, such as Rethinking Economics: An Introduction to Pluralist
Economics, a research paper in sustainability and pluralism economics, and illustrations like an economic cartoon from a wellknown economic columnist. The instructor also invited many keynotes speaker to give a lecture relevant to the class topic. On
top of that, we also had a field trip to see how the low-carbon transition is really implemented in the United Kingdom. Forinstance, I had a chance to visit Bunhill Energy Centre, London's heat network system that provides a future example of adecarbonization energy solution. In almost every class, we had a discussion session to exchange ideas with classmates frommany countries. Personally, this section provides a chance to revise the lecture content and learn economics from classmates'experiences.
Besides the intense coursework, the summer program provided many opportunities to meet passionate fellows around theglobe. There are three social programs each week to meet other people from the different modules in the program. Forinstance, we had a British culture quiz program to learn about British culture, a chance to watch Shakespeare's Globe, and a day
trip to university cities like Oxford and Cambridge.
All in all, I had a one of a great experience in my life to study at the top ten university and live in one of the most vibrant cities
in the world, London for this three week. I will not have this chance without the support from the Tasaki foundation anduniversity of Tokyo’s global leadership program., I truly appreciate the support I receive for this summer school study. I attach
some photos during my study at UCL below.