Spring in Korea

Spring has arrived in Korea a while ago, but I’m only writing now because I finally feel like I have enough photos to show! (Actually more like I was busy with midterms and thesis :P)

So spring, where the freezing winter is no longer and you see the sun more, the green shoot growing and the flowers blooming. I still can’t decide if my favorite season is spring or fall, but I love the feeling of warming days and finally being able to shed those down jackets in exchange for colorful knits and now it’s even warm enough for cardigans! Oh the joy 😀

So the signal of spring in Korea comes sometime around mid-March, when the temperatures begin to slowly rise above 0°C. Though the skies are still gloomy and your fingers are still frozen, you realise that the sun rises and sets a little later every day. By the end of March, the real spring weather (around 10-15°C) would have arrived in Korea usually! But by mid-May or June it would be the sweltering summer so make the most of spring!

Some features of spring in Korea:

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.

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!

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 UIC Summer Programme (for high school students)

Yup, that’s exactly what it is! For all you high school students out there who are confused and wondering about how studying in Korea would be like, this is a great opportunity for you to experience it yourself!

Yonsei UIC now has a 3-week summer programme that allows you to experience what life in Korea would be like!! I personally think that it’s a really good opportunity, whether you eventually decide to study at UIC or Yonsei or not. Many students ask me about how life is like in Korea, but sometimes it’s really difficult to talk about it because #1 I don’t know where to start from, there’s just too many things, #2 the experience differs for everyone and it also really depends on individual’s personal preference too. So I personally feel that the best would be for you to experience it yourself and decide if life of a student in Korea is suitable for you!!

[Promotion] Irene’s Diary, a blog about life of a girl studying abroad in Korea!

So….my Singaporean friend in Korea (whom I got to know through this blog when I first started it and now we’re both happy and all in Korea :D) has just started a blog on her own!

The reason why I’m promoting her blog is because while my blog is mostly education-centered and about Korean universities, I get many emails and questions about life in Korea in general. Since I don’t have the discipline and talent to blog about such things (cos I’m a boring person :P), I thought it would be good to give you a link to my friend’s blog so that you can kind of see how life is like in Korea ^^

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 (: