An evening in Sinchon

Spring is finally here!! The weather is finally humane enough for hanging out (at least for me), and the flowers are blooming everywhere and it’s beautiful~~

So to commemorate the beginning of spring I went with my friends to watch the film Twenty starring Kim Woobin, Kang Haneul and 2PM Junho! Some of the cinemas in Seoul offer English subtitles for Korean movies so be sure to check it out before heading down ^^ The Sinchon CGV is one of those that offer movies in English subtitles (for certain showtimes), as well as Hongdae CGV as far as I know.

Korean film Twenty starring Kim Woobin, Kang Haneul and 2PM Junho!

Popcorn is a must for me when I come to cinemas ㅋㅋ Large popcorn + 2 drinks + nachos is only W10,500!! Much cheaper than Singapore I think.

Live chat event with current Underwood International College students!

After a few months of spamming you guys with travelling in Korea and education-related topics, I am finally sharing more about studying in Korea! Hope that you guys don’t mind because I do feel that you can learn more about travelling in Korea as part of student life, and education articles are a way of showing what activities you can join in Korea as a “SNS supporter” of a UNESCO organization.

This “SNS supporters” thing seems quite unique to Korea, basically organizations like to recruit university students to help promote them or some ideas on their own SNS channels. For instance, Wow Korea supporters aim are supposed to promote Korean tourism. And as UNESCO APCEIU supporter I join conferences or events and through writing articles I’m supposed to promote education for international understanding. There are many other organizations recruiting supporters too, such as KOTRA from what I’ve heard. So depending on your interests there are many such organizations you can join, outside of school!

But I digress. The main point of this post is this live event that I’m very excited about! So basically two of my best friends in school, Amalia and Thanh who are running the Woori UIC Youtube channel are planning to hold a live event via Youtube! What this means is that you get to chat with them in real time, and get all the answers to your questions immediately!

Dreaming Korea – Useful website for prospective students

As I always say, I am quite a boring person (no joke!) and I’m been getting increasingly busy with school which means less time for updates, so I am constantly on the lookout for other related websites where you guys can get to know more about student life in Korea or about some other universities.

Recently I was contacted by Dreaming Korea, a website that provides information for students who wish to further their studies in Korea. Looking at their website, I really wish that it had existed at the time I was applying for university! It has basically collated much information about the various universities that you can easily access, and also features some posts about universities or life in general. Now this is important because my experience is mostly about Yonsei University or just Underwood International College, and everything else is what I hear from some of my friends from other universities. But reading interviews from this website you can directly hear from other students in some other universities!

These are the main reasons why I decided to contribute to the website (under Community –> Campus Life) and gave an interview with the website. I guess I never really got down to talking about my life in Korea more personally because I never had the full list of questions before. Perhaps the interview might answer some of your questions too!

URL to the interview:

FAQ about Undergraduate Studies in Korea

Hello all! Hope everyone is having a good summer break!

As incoming freshmen for Fall 2014 are receiving acceptance letters and preparing to come to Korea, it signals the start of another cycle of applications for graduating high school seniors!

It’s been a little past 3 years since I’ve started this blog, and I’m approaching my final year of undergraduate studies in Korea. In the past 3 years, I’ve been asked many questions, and as the workload in college got heavier and heavier (as you might guess from my lack of posts), I have accumulated a great backlog of emails last semester (my busiest semester yet) which I guiltily cleared and replied a week or two before finals (Sorry to those of you who had to wait so long ><).

To make things a little more efficient, ie you being able to get information more quickly and not dependent on how busy I am, I’ve decided to compile a list of FAQ and will be setting that up in a new section on the blog! I will post again when I create the new section (:

In the meantime, one of my best friends in Korea who I got to know 3 years ago through this blog has created a youtube video on FAQ about undergraduate studies in Korea!

Connecting with Singaporeans in Korea and New Classmates

I feel quite stupid for not saying this earlier (it’s been what, 3 years since my first post on this blog? Unbelievable), but for all of you Singaporeans who are coming to Korea for long-term and wish to get in touch with the Singaporean community, here are some things you might want to register for. (Same goes for those of you who are not Singaporeans, you can do so with your own country representatives!)

1) Join the Singapore Club Seoul (SCS)!

Currently there’s a Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/singaporeclubseoul/ which you can request to join.

You can also email them directly at singaporeclubinseoul@gmail.com

You can join even if you’re not located in Seoul too! We’re a small but tight-knitted community here I would say, and it does feel a lot more cosy and less “formal” than some other Singapore clubs in other countries that I’ve been to. The staff at our embassy here in Seoul are really kind and fun-loving too, and our ambassador is very friendly and approachable. We join events such as the Seoul Friendship Fair every year, mostly with food booth selling delicious Singaporean food that Singaporeans in Seoul all miss dearly! There are also various events organized by SCS such as potluck bbq and probably the biggest event in the year, the National Day celebrations where it’s another chance to feast on Singaporean food 😀 Do join and keep in touch with the Singaporean community here! There are just times when you need someone to speak in Singlish to and crack jokes that only Singaporeans can relate to, so it’s always good to keep in touch with other Singaporeans in Korea!

2) Register yourself with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Clearing the Immense Backlog

In a bid to procrastinate when you have a mountain of work to complete (I’m sure many of you have had the same experience), I took the excuse to come back to the blog!

First off, I am so sorry to everyone who has emailed or commented, because I took an impossibly long amount of time to reply you guys. There are some emails even from March which I have yet to reply (Please forgive me!! ㅠㅠ) I have to say that the exchange to Japan last fall semester did allow me to relax a little, but it also made it a little more difficult to get back on track to the academic rigor in UIC… I am now replying the emails and comments so please wait a little more!

On another note, it’s been almost 3 years since I’ve started my life in Korea and in UIC, and I just have about 1 more year left. There are so many things that I would like to share with all of you before I leave, but senior year will probably be crazier than it already is for me now ): I will still try my best to update more often though.

What I have no time to say in words, I shall leave in photos. Spring came really early to Korea this year, temperatures were so warm that the cherry blossoms bloomed exceptionally early this year! (Usually they bloom towards the end of April, this year they were in full bloom in early April!) I took a trip down to Busan and Gyeongju as well since my sister visited, as well as some interesting places in the vicinity of Gyeonggi-do and Gangwon-do (the two provinces really close to Seoul). I hope that these photos will give you a better idea of how life in Korea can be! 😀

Useful Links

If you haven’t already noticed, I added a “Useful Links” page a few months ago!

I’ve added links to some of the top 10~15 universities in Korea, and also some Youtube channels I found that covered life in Korea or student life in Korea and things like that.

Yonsei University – UIC Channel

Okay now on a different note from the previous post, I’m going on to my aim of posting on the blog today.

I just discovered that UIC has a Youtube Channel!

http://www.youtube.com/user/uicchannel?feature=results_main

Struggling to study in Korea – my thoughts

Let me start by saying that this post is entirely my own opinion and does not reflect the position of anyone else or any other institutions. Also, what I’ll be talking about is based on my own experience here in Yonsei UIC so I know that I can’t generalise for all universities across Korea. But I would just like to clarify that while there are many reports about Korea being “racist” or unaccepting of foreigners and so may affect some of your decisions to come here to pursue your studies, my experience here so far is a different story.

A few weeks ago, my friend posted this link on Twitter and so being an international student studying in Korea myself I was curious as to what other international students here thought about studying here.

The article here:

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2012/05/137_110797.html

The author of this article is an Indonesian student in her freshman year at KAIST. She also happens to be a Muslim who wears a hijab (a headscarf). In the article, the main problems she mentioned include:

1. Language barrier

2.  “Koreans don’t seem to feel comfortable with questions, and are slow to criticize”

3. Tendency to be unaccepting of other cultures