Today we visited Yonsei University, one of the top universities in Korea. It’s very exclusive, apparently only letting students who got a perfect or almost perfect score on the entrance exams in. The campus is within Seoul, but it’s walled off from everywhere, so it feels separate from the city. It’s a very green campus, with lots of trees and lawn space, as well as many fountains, so it feels like an upscale city block more than a university.

We took a tour of the university, going over its history and student daily life. The university originally started as a hospital founded by Christian missionaries, and the medical school is still one of the most popular courses at the university. The university has obviously grown a lot since then, with over 25,000 students and 10 schools. It has seen a lot as well: the campus was a battleground during the Korean war, and one of the statue podiums has bullet marks on its side.

We ate lunch at the student cafeteria, which was almost like regular restaurant food. Drinking water isn’t a thing in Korean meals, so there was a dispenser with small paper cups for water and coffee as the only source of beverage. It was hard to keep cool without water, eating hot soup on such a hot and sunny day, but I made it through.

We got to tour the student labs after lunch, which were all upperclassmen classes. The freshman class is located on a separate, international campus in Incheon, so they can get used to campus life and socialize. Meanwhile, the upperclassmen electrical engineering labs were very advanced- everyone was very focused and worked with high level materials in coding and circuitry.

Finally, we toured a research facility and startup located on campus, started by one of the professors there. The research facility and startup both focused on biotechnology and explained what they were each doing in very technical terms. The research facility was studying a brain chemical that allows the brain to process with texture it is touching, and experimented with mice as a substitute for humans. The start-up worked with stem cells to create organoids to repair damaged organ tissue. It was all a little outside of my understanding, but very interesting.

Until next time!