Exchange at SeoulTech 101
Hello! My name is Alexandr Yakumas and I am a 3rd year student of the MIEM faculty, the "Infocommunication Technologies and Communication Systems" program.
I'd been nurturing the idea of taking part in the international academic mobility program for a long time and finally decided to apply to Seoul National University of Science and Technology during the Spring semester of 2019.
Perhaps the first stage of document preparation was the most difficult since you need to understand the requirements, and, most importantly, make your own study plan. Before attaching everything to LMS, it was necessary to amend the curriculum several times, discuss the possibility of distance learning with professors or search for online courses (if it was not possible to replace the subject at the partner University).
Then you receive a long-awaited message about the nomination for studying, you are contacted by the coordinator from the partner University, and you calmly apply for studying, register for courses, obtain a visa and insurance. It is also worth trying to get a scholarship either from a partner University or from HSE. I applied for an Endowment Fund Mobility Scholarship and successfully passed the competition and became a scholarship holder.
I would like to note that the list of courses offered by the host coordinator varies several times before the start of the educational process, so be ready to make corrections in your personal study plan and coordinate them with the academic supervisor and the Student Affairs Office. Moreover, upon arrival, you will be given a week to familiarize yourself with the chosen subjects, and there is a possibility that you will have to cancel or replace a course for one reason or another (for example, the teacher warned that he would conduct lectures entirely in Korean). Fortunately, I was lucky because the version of my curriculum compiled a few weeks before departure was final.
A few days before departure, you will be contacted by a buddy (at HSE he/she is called “a curator”), who will provide you with all the necessary information about a free transfer on the day of the arrival, as well as the room number in a dormitory in case you decided to stay on campus. There are quite a lot of types of dorms. I wanted to stay in a single room and my application was approved. The thing is that guys have the right to live in single rooms only in the building of the Sunglim International Dorm, while girls are given an opportunity to choose between Sunglim International and Nuri (a new women's dormitory), besides dorms are partially occupied by other students.
As I already wrote, during the first few weeks there are no classes. First, there is an orientation session covering regulations, rules and security services in the city. On the same day, you submit an application for the Alien Registration Card. With this card it is possible to stay more than 90 days in Korea and go abroad and then easily return to the country.
Members of the ISC (International Student Club) organized a team building game to get us acquainted with the territory of the University. It is really large and includes many buildings and a park area. It was nice to know in the end that my team won. We were given a 100000₩ (about 5500₽) certificate for a restaurant. A couple of months later, I saw an ICS poster with a photo of our team on all the stands of the University (they were looking for recruits to the ISC). The buddies also offer you to join informal meetings with other students to make new friends and go on cultural trips during the semester. This time there was a trip to the demilitarized zone on the border with North Korea. Unfortunately, I missed it, but I was not really upset, as I had already visited that place in 2015.
So, the studies begin. You have formed your own list of courses and should attend each one according to the schedule. All classes last for 50 minutes. Typically, every course includes a combined 3 classes session during one day weekly. The interval between classes is 10 minutes. There is no division into lectures and seminars, as we have in Russia - all classes are conducted by a professor in a lecture format with explanations of tasks. Sometimes the teacher devotes time to practical tasks. For example, in the Broadcasting Communication Theory discipline we worked with a well-known technical program MATLAB. I chose 5 disciplines in Korean University. Basically, all of them were conducted in classrooms, but one professor literally made my Friday day off, deciding to give the lecture on that day online. It could be viewed at a certain time on a website similar to the HSE system LMS. Here it is called e-Class. Professors place special emphasis on attendance - at the beginning they warn that absence at a few classes (I do not remember the exact number) leads to suspension from the course. Moreover, 3 late arrivals count as one absence.
The canteen also opens at the beginning of the semester. Here you can choose your meal plan or completely refuse. To be honest, it was quite hard for me to eat in the canteen (I signed up for a lunch and a dinner plan). Lunches were pretty nice, there were dishes of European cuisine sometimes. But for dinner they constantly offered spicy Korean food. Since I'm not a fan of most Asian dishes, I simply stopped going to the cafeteria after a couple of months. But it was not a problem to find where to eat since there are a lot of places near the campus. You can find food for every taste - from fast food to delicious rice with tuna or Italian pizza and pasta. But most of all I loved beverages in Korea. They were perfect - such a choice of high-quality fresh juices, teas, coffee for affordable prices.
Make sure to see all the sights (from palaces to amusement parks), it will be enough time to do it. I was lucky to visit the South of the country - the city of Busan. Korea is completely different there - from people and climate to amazing landscapes.
I hope that my feedback will be useful to some of the future students of SeoulTech. I would like to thank Higher School of Economics for allowing students to develop and participate in such useful programs as the Academic Mobility Program. I wish you all good luck in your upcoming journeys!