Today, we went on a visit to the Pohang University of Science and Technology, also known as POSTECH. We first watched a presentation given by an Industrial Engineering professor who gave a presentation introducing us to POSTECH, and advertising the potential to study abroad with POSTECH’s partnership with Pitt. Afterwards, a graduate student who has done research at Pitt during the past few summers gave a presentation, and I actually talked to him a couple times throughout the visit.

After watching presentations, we were given a tour of some of the labs at POSTECH and I was very impressed. All of these labs were heavily ECE releated, so I paid close attention. There were lots of interesting things to see students working on like putting antenna inside of glass or paintings and innovative speakers. The most interesting labs to me were the ones with the quantum computers. I have considered pursuing a minor in quantum information or computing at Pitt, and wrote my paper for the First Year Engineering Conference on Quantum Error Correction, but I think I still didn’t have the knowledge to fully appreciate what was going on in the labs. While there’s a lot that I’m unsure about, I know that Quantum Computing is a very promising topic that could make computing so much more efficient than it is today, if that even seems possible. It was just really interesting to finally see what I have been curious about for so long in person.

After visiting the student labs, we visited some of the professional level labs they have at POSTECH. Most notably, we visited the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if giant particle accelerators like this were even real, and thought that they belonged in science fiction movies.

As a whole, it was very interesting to see a campus like POSTECH’s. The campus is about three times as large as Pitt’s, but they have only about 4,000 students. To be honest, this made the campus feel very empty, but I can tell that the students who were there belonged there. Everyone at POSTECH seems very passionate about their field of study, and I’m very happy I visited.