Today was our first full day in Pohang, and we started off the day with a visit to POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology). It’s a beautiful and modern suburban-style campus that stretches around 400 acres (about 2.5 times larger than Pitt). I really enjoyed walking around; the buildings are large and bright, the landscaping is inviting, and the hills around campus are lush. I’m not sure how it would be in the winter trekking around the grounds, but for a summer it could be cool. Despite the large size, it has very small population, with around 1400 undergraduates, 2700 graduate students, and 300 faculty across just 16 departments including the standard engineering fields, a few natural sciences, and a few computer sciences. POSTECH takes pride in being a small university, and one of the phrases that our presenter frequently repeated was “small but strong”. When I talked to one of the students about the very small size, he told me that it was unusual even for Korea, but POSTECH was founded as a semi experimental university, where rather than bringing in more students, they admit a very small class (making admission very competitive) but then give students resources and opportunities not easily available in the big schools.
At our visit, we got to take a tour of a few labs and see some demonstrations. One was a lab that works with very thin materials with embedded systems such as antennas, opacity-changing materials, and speakers, while the other worked with quantum computers, something that none of us really understood but which looked pretty cool. Incidentally, there was also a lab that allegedly worked with soft robots, my personal interest, but they never showed us any. We later visited the two accelerator laboratories, very unique instruments that I also didn’t fully understand but which also looked very impressive.
Finally, we ate lunch with some POSTECH undergrads to learn a bit more about Korean student life and youth perspectives. Now I will admit that I am writing this a few days later, so when discussing student life, I’ll also bring in some information from our student tour the day after. I was pleasantly surprised to find that we were really similar in so many ways: we had the same kinds of standing jokes (the stereotype CS and engineering majors liking anime, for example), we all enjoy skipping classes once in a while, and we shared similar political beliefs (particularly related to populism, which is a bigger topic of discussion in Korea due to the influence of the chaebols).
I talked to them about the fact that the language of instruction is English (after the first year). Our self-identifying “USA-coded” tour guide said that for hi
Overall, I was impressed with and inspired by POSTECH. I would absolutely consider going there for a summer or even semester abroad, to do research or to take courses.
Anyways, after returning to Pohang, we went out to the beaches (again) for a relaxing walk along the docks and up to the spacewalk, which was unfortunately closed, but still pretty fantastic to look at.
Now for a bit of my surprise about the institution and subsequent research.
So as I said before, POSTECH takes great pride in being “small but strong”. And they are certainly strong; the university brings in close to a million dollars of research funding per year per faculty member, and the research output matches. The facilities are state of the art; not just the accelerators, but the semiconductor fabs, the quantum computers, and the general research laboratories. In addition, POSTECH has CHANGeUP Ground, an intitution that seems to be some kind of incubator for startups. In all respects, POSTECH is a top tier university that hits above its weight class (size, age, locality) in almost all respects.
My question is how they’ve managed to do this in just 40 years, it seems almost impossible. My intuition says that building a campus of that size is not a huge feat if you throw enough money at it, and even building the accelerator labs can probably be done with enough foreign expertise and funding. POSCO did invest a great deal when they started the university; although we don’t know exactly how much, their continued donations of over 300 Billion KRW (>200 million dollars) over the last 20 years says a lot. But attracting talent is probably harder, because researchers have to be willing to leave their positions at established institutions, something that cannot always be accomplished with money. In the case of POSTECH, it might have been easier though, since the idea of a primarily research focused university was not popularized in Korea until the 70s/80s, so POSTECH was probably in a good position to attract Korean talent who may have otherwise taken their skills to the US or other countries with existing research infrastructure. Comparatively, starting such a prestigious research university in the USA today is probably pretty hard simply because the great talent is already tied up in the Berkeleys and Stanfords and MITs of the world. Quick additional theory, I wonder if a large part of talent attraction was done by a method similar to Taiwan’s “reverse brain drain”, which resulted in their semiconductor empire.
Anyways, while POSTECH was likely not a primary factor in the rise of Korean research output, it certainly rode the wave, which has only sped up. NRF, The Korean version of the USA’s NSF, has a budget around 6.5 billion dollars, compared to around 9 billion dollars in the USA. This represents a much larger percentage (~5%) of the national GDP devoted to research. There have also been major collaborations between academia and the chaebols, funneling more money and motivations into particular fields of research such as semiconductors. Because of this, South Korea’s research output as a country has grown significantly in the last 3-4 decades, but unlike countries such as the US or the UK, much of the research is highly industry-focused, leading to overall national technological improvement.
So how did POSTECH grow so fast? My guess is some combination of all of these factors: a huge amount of funding from POSCO and other private companies, strategic aquisition of talented researchers, and riding the wave of the recent Korean scientific revolution.
But this is all just theory; if I ever return to POSTECH though, I will definitely be asking around about it.
That’s the conclusion.
– Rohit