Yonsei University

Finally, the post I should have done up loooooong ago, the post about my school!

I shall not talk about all those history and how it was founded etc. Cos it can all be found on Wikipedia (:

Yonsei University is ranked #3 in the Joongang Ilbo Korean Universities Rankings 2012, after KAIST and POSTEC, overtaking Seoul National University. It is the best private university in Korea. It is ranked #114 in QS world ranking for the year 2013/14, and #16 in QS Asia ranking for the year 2013 .

Now that we’re done with the technical parts, I’ll move on to my own experience in Yonsei University and things you should know if you want to enter.

Firstly, I will talk about UIC – Underwood International College. It’s a 4-year liberal arts college in Yonsei. Classes are conducted in English (so no worries for non-Korean speakers), and while international students are the minority (my batch had about 30+ international students out of about 200 students in total) there is great diversity here. We have people mostly from Vietnam, China and the United States, but we also have students from France, Uzbekistan, Belgium, Poland, Iran, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore (me!! hehe) just to name a few from my batch. Senior batches have great diversity too. The Korean students are mostly those who have lived overseas for a period of time, whether they grew up overseas (I’ve met one who grew up in Kenya) or their parents sent them to the States for a year or two to improve their English (apparently this is really common here). So don’t worry about the language part, cos everyone in UIC speaks English (:

Fall (Autumn) in Korea

I know it’s the dead of winter now in Korea but I had to start with a season I experienced first when I got to Korea ;D

Fall in Korea starts around late September and ends around mid November.. Although they always say that Fall starts in September, that’s not true cos it’s still as hot as summer the whole of September ==” And though they say winter officially starts in December, we’re already all freezing by the end of November >< (20th Nov was the most memorable, it was like 0°C that day ㅠㅠ)

The temperatures during autumn are pretty cool, usually in the range of low 20°C in the beginning and reaching about 10°C towards the end of the season… It’s a really enjoyable season in the beginning, but as it slowly drops towards 10°C and with the wind, you might start to feel cold D:

Korean Food #1: Bibimbap!

So I decided to talk about Korean food, which was suggested by one of the readers and my new 친구 (meaning friend in Korean) 😀 And if we talk about Korean food, how can we not talk about Bibimbab!!

비빔밥 (Bibimbab)

비빔 (bibim) means “to mix” and 밥 (bab) means rice. It usually comes with a type of sauce known as gochujang, which can be spicy. Basically you’re supposed to mix all the ingredients and the rice together, and it will end up looking like this: