Plus3 Korea gave me a greater overall understanding of engineering and technology not only at the professional level, but also at a global and multidisciplinary scale. Before going on this trip, I thought about engineering mostly through my experiences in my classes and from what I had heard professional engineers speak about. After visiting numerous companies, POSTECH, and cultural sites throughout South Korea, I now not only have a better understanding of engineering at a professional level, but also a broader understanding of the field as a whole. As an ECE student with an interest in a concentration in autonomous systems, this trip gave me a great introduction to what I hope to learn in some of my ECE elective classes that focus on this concentration. I think it will be cool to have seen a real world application in person and learn about how it can be applied, and then later learn about how it actually works in the classroom. I saw examples of this technology in manufacturing, transportation, research, infrastructure, and sustainability. Another important thing that I learned was my professional growth is not and should not be limited to my technical knowledge, but also should involve ethics, communication, teamwork, and cultural awareness.

I want to begin by discussing the topic of ethical issues in my profession. The closest related experience to this idea I had in Korea was our visit to TOPIS at Seoul City Hall. At TOPIS, I learned how smart systems were used by the Korean government in Seoul using cameras, sensors, data analysis, and automation to enforce traffic laws and improve the overall flow of traffic in Seoul. I found this to be very impressive because in a city as big as Seoul I can imagine that driving can be a nightmare, especially comparing it to my experience visiting large cities in the United States like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. To my surprise, traffic in Seoul seemed more manageable than I expected for a city so large, and was more comparable to a moderately sized city like Pittsburgh, and I believe this is due to technology being used at TOPIS, and believe that I would be interested in working with systems like this in my career. While this technology is impressive, I think it’s important to consider privacy concerns that follow this surveillance. For example, if cameras and sensors are constantly running and collecting information, it’s important to think carefully about how much data is being collected, who gets access to it, how long it should be stored, and how it should be used. Even though it seems like the primary purpose of this technology is to improve the flow of traffic and enforce laws, citizens still deserve privacy and transparency. I’m glad I got to visit TOPIS because it allowed me to not only explore an exciting new technology, but also remember that the technology that engineers create affects people in the real world.

Next, I want to discuss educational breadth as professional development. Even though I am studying Electrical Engineering, some of the most valuable things I learned on this trip were how various other fields can connect to engineering. Company visits also showed me how engineering connects to business, sustainability, public health, cybersecurity, and culture. For example, learning about Arisu at the Ttukdo Water Purification Facility and getting to see how they purified water connected to public health and sustainability, as well as why Seoul’s approach to water purification was so unique. It was also cool to learn more about water purification and its history in general at their water museum. Clean water is something that is often taken for granted, and it is good to understand the technical and organizational systems behind it. Additionally, company visits to Samsung, POSCO, and Hyundai showed connections to supply chains, manufacturing, marketing, and automation. At the same time, cultural experiences such as the DMZ, temple stay, KBO baseball game, historic sites, and the ability to freely explore cities like Seoul and Pohang helped me see more of the society that contains all of these smart systems and how well integrated they are, as well as being able to journal throughout the trip to reflect on each day as I went. These cultural experiences were just as important as the company visits and academic experiences because they helped me better understand a society so different from my own, as well as how they are implementing new technology.

Another topic that stood out to me was lifelong learning and continuing education. I thought about this most during our visits to POSTECH. At POSTECH, we got the opportunity to visit several research labs, and luckily for me they were all closely related to ECE. Some projects included hidden antennas, innovative speakers, quantum computers, and a particle accelerator. I am still yet to take an ECE lab at Pitt, so seeing some of these made me very excited for the classes I will take next year and labs I may participate in in the future. Seeing real quantum computers was also amazing because I actually wrote a research paper on Quantum Error Correction for one of my classes last semester. If I want to work with advanced technology like this in the future, I now know that I will need to continue learning not just in my classes but also through research opportunities, professional experience, and my own curiosity. I understand that I won’t learn everything I need to know from my degree, and have to be able to retain the ability to learn new things effectively.

The social environment of professional life is something that I didn’t really think about before going on this trip. Throughout the program, I interacted with other Pitt students, professors, program leaders, tour guides, company representatives, Korean students, and other locals. For interactions with people who lived in Korea, even though I had never interacted with anyone from their culture before, I found my past traveling experience to be beneficial because I found it easy to adjust and learn to speak with someone in a context like this. Specifically, talking to students at POSTECH made the visit to the university feel a lot more personal and also helped me imagine what it would be like to study or do research in that environment. I’m also extremely grateful to have made a number of friendships with peers while on this trip that I may have not met otherwise. All of this helped me realize that professional environments are naturally pretty social, and people need to be able to ask questions, explain and listen to others’ ideas, and build relationships with people from different backgrounds.

On the topic of social environments, I think it’s important to bring up the importance of working in multidisciplinary teams. My group’s final presentation was a great example. Preparing for this presentation required us to divide work and combine different perspectives and experiences that we all had on the trip. Initially, it was difficult to choose a topic for the presentation, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to professionally discuss our options as a team rather than being assigned a random topic. Specifically, we presented on POSCO, and explained some of the smart systems that the company used and made comparisons to Pittsburgh, since both cities are known for steelmaking. Additionally, four of our team members were engineering students, and one student was SCI. This allowed us to properly present on what we were interested in, and the engineering students would present on POSCO’s engineering processes, automation, and sensors and the SCI student presented on POSCO’s data analysis and simulations. I think it’s great that we were all able to find something that interested us about POSCO. This also reflected what we experienced while visiting companies. Large systems like POSCO, TOPIS, Hyundai, and Arisu can’t run on just one type of expertise. They require lots of different types of engineers, as well as managers, operators, data analysts, technicians, and designers to run. This was one of the clearest examples of how engineering is a collaborative field and learning to work in teams like this is so important. Even if one person understands the technical part of a system, that does not mean that they understand the logistics and social side of it.

I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in Plus3 Korea. Throughout the program, I have grown not only as a student, but as a professional, teammate, and future engineer. Plus3 showed me that engineering is not just technical, but also social, ethical, cultural, and collaborative. I’m happy to have been able to visit professional and cultural sites, and think more deeply about my field of engineering and how innovation can happen worldwide. Also, I’m thankful to have learned that technology not only affects companies and industries, but also cities, communities, and people’s everyday lives. Above all, I’m glad that I made so many new friends and memories on this trip, many of which I would not have had without this experience.