University life in Korea

Hey guys !

This is something I'm really eager to share with you guys because I get tons of questions regarding my studies, my major, my university and so on. As you know I attended the Hanyang language institute last year and I wrote a Korea one-o'-one post about it here. But rather than making this an informative Korea101 - type of a post I decided to just concentrate on honestly telling my opinion and how everything has went this year this far and how I feel about my studies in general, et cetera ! 

School started on the second of March and before that there was an orientation for us international students. We were not informed about any other orientations or events besides this one, so obviously I went there. It was this one day long event where we got information about university life and then got divided into smaller groups and taken to the computer class to choose what courses we want to take and learned how to do the course registration, which was going to happen the next week. 

Course registration here in Korea is a real battlefield where the weaker get eliminated real quickly and only the strongest and fastest clickers survive alive from the battle and get the courses they want. When the course registration starts probably more than hundred people will click the same button at the same time with you to get to a course with a limitation of max 30 people or so. I got lucky and got all my courses but I'm sure this will not happen every semester so I am already like mentally preparing myself for that.  

One thing that I've learned is that you definitely need to stay active instead of waiting the university to give you information because they don't. Few days after school had started I learned that all the MeCom (Media communication) students had already had few meetups and their own orientation. They had met the sunbaes (older students) and had a party together, et cetera. Basically everyone knew each other and I was the foreign student who knew nothing about anything and got left out. 

When I heard this I honestly got very stressed and stalked the whole facebook around to find some people studying in my major or even like groups meant for us media students. Finally I found one, got accepted in it and wrote a panic post asking if there's any get togethers for media students and who should I contact regarding these matters. Because well, as a international student they had completely left me out of the whole thing and no one was telling me absolutely anything. This is something that I've heard happen several times to like, well, everyone who studies here in Korea. I don't know why but schools seem to expect that us international students do not want to like actively participate in university life. 

Anyway what I want to say is that if you are coming here for uni or are here and have noticed this happening to you too then STAY. ACTIVE. Use your social media skills to find a link to get into the circles or go to your international affairs - office and ask, ask ask. Someone will definitely help you and give you some kind of a contact information to get in touch with other students from your own major.

When you do get into the circles school life will get a lot easier and it will be just amazing. It's all about hanging out together all. The. Time. We have a kakao group chat for all media communication students & own chat for the class of 16. In addition we have a group chat for only girls, and then another 2 group chats for like our own class which has about 14 students in total. So it is very social and all the information pretty much just moves through those group chats, school offices don't really inform us about anything. 

University life here is really active and studying comes like after pretty much everything else. In addition to like regular after school activity - clubs (they literally have everything from dancing to debating and skiing) our own school, Department of social studies that have students in 4 majors in total, has own clubs for only our students. Hip hop club, dance club and a band club. Most of the students in those clubs are from Media communication though. It seems to be a widely know inside joke that us Media communication students are the loudest, wildest & most active students among the social studies department. As if that's not enough we also have clubs only meant for Media communication students. There's about 5 of them and they all are very related to our own studies. I recently joined a club where we write, film and edit music videos, trailers, movies, short-movies, news, skits, et cetera. So those are like for us to get some experience and get better at what all of us are probably going to end up doing after graduation. Here is an example of the music video & trailer they did last year. Go check them out, they're pretty great ! Below's our club's group picture. 

Besides these endless club activity options Korean students seem to love after school drinking, too. Some of us go drinking literally every night, and then the next morning try to rush to the first classes of the day. When you combine 8 hour school days, after school club activities and ending the night with friends in a restaurant & maybe a round of noraebang it's pretty understandable why I haven't been blogging a lot lately, right? 

What comes to university lectures here it seems pretty much like Finland's high school life. Professors are not strict (most of the time) so you are free to use your phone or sleep or what not but you need to stay quiet (obviously) and you only get 4 absences from one course before they kick you out. Which makes sense, because people fight to get into those lectures so why not show up to the class then. 

Usually the professors have Power point presentations and we follow the lecture and study through those. Books are not very often used. There's a book almost for every class I think, but most of the time the professors tell you it's up to you if you want to get the book or not. We have this HY-IN - portal site where we can do online assignments, listen to online lectures, submit our assignments and papers and also where some of the teachers upload the PPT file we went through during the class, so you can like study after the class too. I've really liked this online system this far. It works well and it's easy to use. There are also some courses that are completely online courses so those are done through hy-in as well. 

We have a lot of group projects. A lot of them. Koreans seem to love group projects. We also have a lot of assignments. Most of the studying takes place outside university lectures so don't be fooled; your timetable might look easy but you will probably still have to work your ass off. Case in point the picture on the left. This is how my timetable looks this semester. Besides these classes I have one online class and in total I get about 15 credits. Even though I don't have much classes I am still completely packed with quizzes, essays, team projects, speeches and online assignments. So do not underestimate the work load you will get! Especially on your first semester my advice would be to get a bit less courses so that you have sort of time to adjust into everything. 

And last but not least I want to talk a bit for something called Membership training that is basically the reason why people go to university here in Korea. Membership training aka MT (엠티) is a trip Korean university students take several times a year. Clubs have their own MT's, major students have their own MT's, et cetera. It's basically an overnight trip we take with friends. Rent a pension, buy 60 bottles of soju and a crapload of food. MT's are usually made of lots of group games, drinking games, karaoke, dancing, BBQ & cooking together, staying up until 7am, making fun of people who passed out before you, sleeping on the floor, taking love shots or dancing in front of everyone as a punishment, and then a very long bus ride back home the next day while completely hungover. MTs are amazing.

So yeah that's pretty much everything I have in my mind for now. University life in Korea has been nothing but great this far and I am really happy I made the choice to come here. If you read all the way down here and you're still with me then wow hello there that must've been hard congratulations and thank you! If you have any questions leave me a comment or message me on tumblr if you're shy. Love you guys ! 

xx,
Julia