u/Visual-Twist6800

I have a supervisor at Institute of Science Tokyo who agreed to support my application for the Doctoral Program, Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Track, under the Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences.

I checked the published application guidelines for this track. There is a self-funded exam route, and a MEXT Embassy Recommendation route. I could not find a published University Recommendation guideline for this general track. University Recommendation guidelines only exist for three named programs under this school, a dentistry program for India and ASEAN, an infectious disease data science program, and an interdisciplinary life science leader program. My case does not fall under any of these three.

I contacted the Yushima International Student Support Group about this. Their reply said the university-recommended MEXT scholarship starts accepting applications every fall, and they asked me to contact them again at the end of October for accurate information. They also said they are not sure of my exact field of study or supervisor, so they could not confirm details now. This did not answer my main question, whether University Recommendation is open to a general Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Track applicant with an individual supervisor, or only to the three named programs.

Has anyone here applied for MEXT University Recommendation at Science Tokyo through the Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Track, without being part of one of the three named programs? Or does this track only offer Embassy Recommendation in practice, with University Recommendation slots going only to the named programs?

I plan to write to admissions again at the end of October as they suggested, but I want to ask here too in case someone has direct experience with this specific school and track.

I downloaded the official DAAD recommendation letter form from the application portal. It has specific sections that need to be filled. I sent this form to my referee.

She did not fill the form. Instead she sent me a separate Word document with all the content for those sections.

Now I have two questions.

1. Do I copy her content into the official form myself and then submit it, or do I send the form back to her and ask her to fill it herself?
2. How does DAAD verify that the referee actually filled the form and not the applicant? In many other portals, the system sends the form directly to the referee's email and the referee submits it back without the applicant being involved at all. But in DAAD's portal, it seems like I am the one submitting the recommendation letter, not the referee.

The form is also quite specific. It only opens in Adobe Acrobat, not other PDF readers, and it has a QR code embedded in it. But I still do not see a mechanism that tells DAAD who actually filled it.

Has anyone been through this? What is the correct process?

I have been using Claude AI throughout my DAAD application process. Not for writing my documents, but for everything around it. Finding my supervisor, drafting and replying to emails, getting feedback on my proposal structure, researching the scholarship process itself. It has been like a coworker throughout.

But I did not copy and paste any AI-generated text into my CV, motivation letter, research proposal, or any other document. Everything in the documents is written by me in my own words.

The DAAD portal asks for a declaration about AI use at the start of the application. I want to be transparent but I am not sure how to handle this.

Two questions for anyone who has been through this:

1. Does using AI for emails and research around the application count as AI use that needs to be declared, even if no AI text appears in the actual documents?
2. Does declaring AI use affect the scholarship decision in any way? Has anyone seen any negative outcome from it?