Today was spent experiencing something we know well in a very different context. That thing was college.
This morning we went to Hanyang University! Founded in 1939 by a musician, Hanyang University was the first private engineering college was South Korea’s first private engineering college. The university is extremely research-focused and is ranked 151st worldwide by QS.
At the university we were given several presentations, as well as a short tour with current student and lunch at one of their dining halls. With the first presentation, we learned about some of Hanyang University’s efforts to internationalize including Hanyang University’s winter and summer schools. These are generally targeted towards foreigners and offer season specific cultural activities to complement the classes. We also learned about the Asia Specific Youth Exchange which allows visiting students to engage with the local community and attempt to work on legitimate local issues, especially with respect to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Because of our interaction with these goals in the last weeks of before our First Year Engineering Conference, the freshmen engineers in ENGR 0012 were presented with a change order to modify our essays and topics to include sustainability, and we were introduced to the sustainable development goals.
Our last lecture was called “Understanding Koeran History, Culture, and Society” in which we went through a compiled list of adjectives our presenter, having grown up in the United States, noticed about Koreans through his personal experience. These adjectives included resilience, perseverance, resourceful, focused , and Korean-Confucian. Resiliency, perseverance, and resourcefulness is all apparent in Korea’s history of invasions and bouncing back from those as well. Of particular interest to me was the part about Korean-Confucianism because even though most Koreans are not actively involved in Confucianism, its influence is still obvious in Korean culture particularly in the language and formal to familiar way people can be addressed.
Throughout our short tour and lunch one of the things I noticed was the similarities between college in America and Korea as far as I understand it. They consist of the same basic structure and elements, but those elements are expressed in a way unique to each country. An example of this is the dining hall. While at home we have a vast array of options in a rather unstructured style, where we ate at Hanyang there were two meal options presented outside the dining area and then based on the line you chose you gathered the pieces of one of those meals. Of course, the food offered at Hanyang University dining hall was Korean food instead of American food which in itself provided a constant reminder that while the setting was familiar, we are in fact halfway across the world. fffffffff
