Day 8 was our first full day in a new location in Korea: Pohang. It’s a city of about 500,000 people, located in the southeast of the country on the ocean. It’s a very different vibe from Seoul, which is a huge city of over 9 million. Although Pohang isn’t a very touristy, we’re here for more professional reasons. The most important reason we’re in Pohang is to visit POSTECH.
POSTECH is the Pohang University of Science and Technology, a research-oriented science and engineering school. Founded in 1986, it’s only 40 years old and has a small student body of only 3,500. Despite this, POSTECH has a much bigger campus than Pitt, not quite being in the heart of the city, and the campus is beautiful.
The visit to POSTECH was the only activity for the day. It started with a professor giving an introductory speech about POSTECH. His son lives in Pittsburgh, so he knew a lot about the city as well, which was cool to see. A POSTECH student then talked a bit about his experience studying at Pitt, since he was an exchange student there. We were also introduced to a girl who is going to be studying abroad there next year. This all made me feel very welcomed at POSTECH. It was kind of heartwarming to see Koreans interested in what is probably a fairly obscure American city to people internationally. Dr. Yun also gave a nice presentation about Pittsburgh and Pitt.
After these presentations, we listened to a talk by a professor in the computer science department. She talked about her various research, both during her PhD and as a professor at POSTECH. She talked about various subjects, but the most interesting to me was her research on socially isolated young adults. We then ate lunch at POSTECH’s e-sports colosseum, which was unlike anything I have seen at a college. The food was good, and there were gaming setups where students were playing video games. I didn’t really have much time to check it out, though, since we were busy talking to some of the students on campus. It was really cool to get to meet Korean people my age and to talk to them about what it’s like in Korea, and discuss differences from the US.
After this, we took a really interesting tour of the electrical engineering department at POSTECH. We visited several research labs at the school and got to see a lot of cool things. My favorite part was the quantum computing lab; I never thought I would get to a quantum computer in person, at least not any time soon. The semiconductor fabrication lab was also really interesting. There were signs everywhere welcoming the University of Pittsburgh to POSTECH, which was again just so cool to see and made me feel extremely welcome there. Then, we visited the particle accelerator they have at the school. This was also just something I never thought I would get to see in real life. It was so cool, but I do wish I understood more about how it worked.
After activities at POSTECH concluded for the day, we spent the evening at Yonguldae beach. A group of about ten of us ate at a Chinese restaurant on the beach, where I got some delicious fried chicken. We then went to Caffe Bene, which is located on a different beach. There, I tried the so-called chocolate devil, which was chocolate gelato on top of shaved ice, with other chocolate pieces and sauce mixed in. It was a nice and relaxing way to spend the night with friends.
