Today we spent nearly the whole day at Yonsei University. Our day started off with a long commute, taking both the subway and bus, and arriving at the Sinchon campus of Yonsei University. When we first arrived, it was slightly raining, but we got out of the rain and into the cafeteria, where we enjoyed lunch. Their cafeteria was very interesting, for you order what you would like at a virtual kiosk and then take your receipt to the counter where you receive your order. I ordered a shrimp and omelet-rice bowl and also some sweet and sour chicken. It was solid and definitely of higher quality than what we served at Pitt. One takeaway is that the Eatery at Pitt has more options than Yonsei’s cafeteria. After lunch, we began our official tour of the campus. The campus was extremely beautiful, boasting new, modern buildings, but also a beautiful older section of the campus. In the middle of this area is a statue of the founder of Yonsei, Horace Grant Underwood. Underwood was a British-American Christian missionary who founded this university, and I was interested to learn that the imperfections on the base of his statue are real bullet holes/marks, for the university was the site of fighting during the Korean War. This part of the campus was by far the most beautiful and my favorite part.

After we toured the campus, we had the opportunity to have two separate tours of different research facilities. First, we had a more general tour of the Engineering research facilities in Yonsei, where we were guided through the whole building and shown some very complex research equipment. Following that tour and an hour-long intermission where I enjoyed an ice cream sandwich between a waffle, we got to meet a former PhD student from Pitt, who is now a neuroscience professor at Yonsei. She was nice enough to tour us through her research lab, where she and her students conduct research on Alzheimer’s Disease, specifically using mouse brain samples. Additionally, we got to meet some of her students, who held a Q&A with us and treated all of us very well. Our tour of this research lab concluded our visit to Yonsei and began a long commute home in the pouring rain. When we eventually did get home, I was exhausted and ready to sleep.